How People Really Use Smart Speakers Will Not Shock You
June 13, 2017
Business Insider tells us a story that we already know, but with a new spin: “People Mainly Use Smart Speakers For Simple Requests.” The article begins that vocal computing is the next stage in computer evolution. The hype is that the current digital assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant will make our lives easier by automating certain tasks and always be ready to answer our every beck and call.
As to be expected and despite digital assistants advancements, people use them for the simplest tasks. These include playing music, getting the weather report, and answering questions via Wikipedia. People also buy products on their smart speakers, much to Amazon’s delight:
Voice-based artificial intelligence may not yet live up to its hype, but that’s not much of a surprise. Even Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said last year that the tech is closer to “the first guy up at bat” than the first inning of its life. But Bezos will surely be happy when more than just 11% of smart speaker owners buy products online through their devices.
Voice-related technology has yet to even touch the horizon of what will be commonplace ten years from now. Bitext’s computational linguistic analytics platform that teaches computers and digital assistants to speak human is paving the way towards that horizon.
Whitney Grace, June 13, 2017
New AI on Personal Digital Assistant Horizon
May 22, 2017
Computer scientists at Princeton University have developed a technology that allows the user to fully edit voice recordings using an intelligent algorithm.
Science Daily in a report titled Technology Edits Voices Like Text says that:
The software, named VoCo, provides an easy means to add or replace a word in an audio recording of a human voice by editing a transcript of the recording. New words are automatically synthesized in the speaker’s voice even if they don’t appear anywhere else in the recording.
The system is capable of recreating voice of the user using an intelligent algorithm. This makes adding words to pre-recorded audio recordings easier. The same technology can also be used to create a custom robotic voice for digital personal assistants.
Currently available audio editing software are capable of snipping and patching small segments of a recording and cannot add non-existent words. Algorithm of VoCo after analyzing the entire recording is able to synthesize any word without difficulty. At this speed, do we see the current breed of rock and pop artists disappearing?
Vishol Ingole, May 22, 2017
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