Tag: voice assistant

Amazon Alexa Receiving Improvements On Indian Speech Patterns

Amazon had unveiled a new category of skill dubbed Cleo for its Indian markets back in 2018. The idea behind Cleo was to improve Alexa’s language model for its Indian users by learning from the customers themselves. The southeastern country is a key region for Amazon Alexa’s global team that is working on drastically improving the user interface.

The company identifying the potential in the market, worked on various regional languages to grow the linguistic capabilities of Amazon Alexa. The voice-based assistant has received a warm welcome in Indian homes with its Echo line up and is still gaining traction in the country. The Indian smart speakers market is currently dominated by Amazon Echo at 59 per cent of the market share while Google Home only has about 39 per cent, as reported by IDC (International Data Corporation).

With such a large user base it is inevitable that the company will seek to expand on its existing language parameters. The Amazon team dedicated to the Indian market have promised robust support on the upcoming regional languages capabilities of Alexa. The voice assistant in its current state is only capable of understanding Hinglish (Hindi-English) commands to a very limited degree.

Amazon is focusing on the content relayed by Alexa along with its contextual and cultural impacts. The company stated that Alexa must sound Indian when it comes to speaking Hindi. Several dialects and accents are being taken into account to give an actual life-like conversational experience with Amazon Alexa in real-world scenarios. Users can respond to Alexa’s English replies with Tamil, Marathi, Kannada, Bengali, Telugu, Gujarati and certain other regional languages.

Also Read: Microsoft Takes Down Online Facial Recognition Database Over Accusations

Amazon Alexa is being pushed by the company to stay relevant and practical in every home with near human-like natural conversations facilitated by Machine Learning. The company has heavily invested in India for developing skills for Alexa by hiring various scientists and engineers. Available in over 80 countries and compatible with 14 languages, the Indian variant would add a lot more languages to the existing list.

June 8, 2019
Amazon Alexa Servers Crash Due To Heavy Traffic

Amazon’s smart voice assistant Alexa is one of the fastest growing, if not the fastest personal assistant out there. Amazon has included Alexa in multiple smart speakers made by the company itself and it is now expanding the reach of the assistant to home appliances and even cars. Alexa’s portfolio and scope are ever-growing. In fact, Amazon reported that Alexa enabled devices were among the best-selling products on Amazon, this holiday season. What’s more, Christmas day turned out to be even more surprising for Alexa enabled devices throughout Europe. With a sea of new Alexa devices being bought and set up, the servers just couldn’t hold it anymore.

The servers went down as they couldn’t handle all the thousands of new Alexa devices being setup at the same time. The apparent Alexa outrage began around 10 AM GMT. With users complaining that they were not able to use their devices. Even for regular tasks such as paying music or using smart home controls. The shortage lasted for a few hours. Amazon was quick to get the servers back online and the devices working again. Another interesting bit of information is the fact that the number of voice activated orders placed this year was far greater, almost 3 times more than the number of orders placed last year.

Also Read : Honor View 20 With In-Screen Camera To Soon Launch In India

The Future

Other than this, Alexa was also summoned ‘hundreds of thousands of times’ to help with cocktail recipes and many other such holiday essentials. But what does all of this mean? The number of Alexa products reflects more about the dependance on smart home assistants, rather than just the sales figures. With growing features, the assistant is no longer restricted to a few devices. And has spread to almost every part of our homes. With the advancement of AI, some of them especially to aid smart assistants, what waits for us is an interesting and exciting future. Where the possibilities of using smart assistants will be endless.

December 27, 2018
Samsung Might Announce Bixby 2.0 In Late October

Samsung may launch a new version of its AI assistant, Bixby at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco. A report from The Korea Herald claims that Samsung has appointed a new executive to lead the Bixby development team. Samsung Research America’s Vice Chief Chung Eui-suk is now the head of developing Bixby as well as other artificial intelligence services. Rhee In-jong, Samsung Mobile’s CTO, who headed Bixby in both Korean and English versions, will reportedly be in charge of smartphone development excluding Bixby.

The report claims that Bixby could also be introduced to third party products beyond smartphones. Expect the AI to receive major upgrades in an attempt to compete with other AI assistants like Google Assistant, Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa, which are already available in a lot of countries.

Bixby was launched alongside Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ in early 2017. Such was the push from Samsung that all the three flagship smartphones in 2017 have a dedicated physical button to access Bixby. When Samsung introduced Bixby, there was a general consensus of it being exactly like Google Assistant. The new Galaxy Tab A also has Bixby, though without the physical button.

Similar to other AI voice assistants like Google Assistant, Siri, and Amazon Alexa, Boxby allows you to verbally communicate with your phone and perform tasks such as googling something, open apps or even make calls or send text messages. You can even point your phone to a certain object and Bixby will be pull up links to buy that product.

In India, Bixby was announced along with the Galaxy Note8 and the roll out of Bixby Voice began in late September. Samsung has said that it has optimised Bixby for India in away that it will understand different Indian accents. This means that your Galaxy flagship phone will respond to you regardless of which region of the country you are from.

How much of an improvement Byxby 2.0 will be over Bixby ‘1.0’ is yet to be seen. Whether Samsung will continue pushing Bixby through its successful flagship smartphones lineup in 2018 is also a question that will be answered in months to come.

October 13, 2017
Amazon Alexa Can Now Recognise Different Voices And Give Personalised Response

The smart speakers market has seen a constant one-on-one between Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home. For a while, Amazon had a US$50 alternative, the Echo Dot to the relatively expensive Echo. On 4th October, Google unveiled a smaller and cheaper alternative to the Google Home, called the Home Mini for a price of US$50. In April of 2017, the Google Home got the ability to recognise different voices in the home and have personalised responses. Amazon has announced that Alexa can do the same thing.

This basically means that if there are three people in the house and you ask Alexa to call a friend, Alexa will look through your profile your contacts by recognising the voice. Same thing will happen with calendars and even the playlists. You can set up voice recognition using the Echo, Echo Dot, or Echo Show. Users are asked to read aloud 10 phrases, and Alexa will then use that data to create a voice profile. After that’s done, voice profiles work across other Echo devices and most of the Alexa-powered third party apps.

Amazon says:

Once you set up the feature, Alexa will learn your voice (versus your spouse/partner/roommate’s voice) and be able to deliver a more personalised experience. Today the feature is available for calling/messaging, flash briefing, shopping, and the Amazon Music Unlimited Family Plan, and it’ll be rolling out to additional Alexa features in the future.

Amazon recently announced the entry of the Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Plus in India. The purchase can be done via an invite only as of now. The cheapest of the three is the Echo Dot priced at Rs 4499.

October 12, 2017
Samsung’s New Virtual Assistant for Mobile Phones Could Arrive Next Year

Virtual assistants seem to be the shiny new toy in the world of smartphones these days. Apple’s Siri led to Microsoft’s Cortana and it simply doesn’t end there. Joining the fray is Samsung with its own rumoured new voice assistant for mobile phones.

Samsung is developing a Virtual Assistant for its devices. It will build on S Voice app with search engine and clever notification.

— S_leak (@sleaknow) December 10, 2015

Samsung already has a voice assistant called S Voice but it’s nowhere close to its Apple and Microsoft counterparts. This is what the company is perhaps working on improving. The new assistant is expected to run on Samsung devices using the S Voice app.

Needless to say, the features would be enhanced and upgraded to ensure an over-all smoother and efficient experience for the user. Because the company has had a history of launching new software with new hardware, we can expect to see the voice assistant with the launch of Galaxy S7 in February 2016.

Via: SamMobile

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December 14, 2015
Microsoft’s Voice Assistant Cortana Coming To Android and iOS Devices Soon

Smartphone voice assistants can be described in plain simple words as ‘freaking cool’. They have come a long way and at present they can almost be seen as the baby versions of Tony Stark’s Jarvis. While Google Now is a great search and convenience tool, Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri have anthropomorphic qualities that let them have human live conversations with the users. Microsoft has decided to take Cortana to a wider audience and will be bringing its voice assistant to iOS and Android devices.

Microsoft has said that it will be introducing Cortana on other operating systems as a standalone app. The company will also be integrating its artificial intelligence(AI) based technology called ‘Einstein’ with the voice assistant. With Einstein’s support, Cortana would be able to read and understand emails that will help it provide more convenient features to the users. It would let it offer suggestions to the user, even before they ask for it, something Google Now has been doing for a while.

Cortana is based on the artificially intelligent character of the same name from the famed video game, Halo. The personality of the voice assistant is also derived from the AI character from the game. Microsoft has been banking on Cortana’s ability to chit chat with the users. Cortana also offers usual voice assistant features like setting reminders and calendar, weather and traffic information, writing notes and messages.

Microsoft will also be bringing Cortana on Windows 10 operating system for desktops. It might actually beat Apple in this field as the Cupertino-based company didn’t bring Siri to the latest Yosemite operating system. Microsoft is contemplating the fall timeframe for the launch of the app. So if you liked Google Now but wanted a more human-like interaction, Microsoft’s Cortana is coming soon to give you company.

Speaking of voice assistants, remember that one time we got Siri to speak in Punjabi?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCB5I4Kqthk

March 14, 2015
Apple to Enable Siri to Understand Indian English

English is a really fluid language. It takes the shape depending on the person who is speaking it. Folks from all parts of the world add their bits to language in terms of accents, slangs, and references. While this diversity makes it unique, it also makes it hard for a voice detection system to understand these various different shades of one language. Apple is trying to make its voice assistant more competent in this regard and is giving it an ability to understand Indian English.

If you are wondering what Indian English is, we suggest you go watch a couple of Russell Peters stand-up acts and get back here. Now, coming back to the story, according to 9to5mac, in the latest iOS 8.3 beta release, Apple has added support for Siri to grab Indian English.

This feature will be available for devices like the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This update also adds support for Russian, Danish, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Thai and Turkish.

One really useful feature of this new update is that it will allow Indians to use the dictation feature without faking a douche-y American or British accent.

Google has a larger user base in the country, and so they have already released support for Indian English on Google Now. Google also plans to offer support for Hindi soon which would help to further grab the market, especially in the mid and affordable segments. All this seems to project the importance of the Indian consumers for smartphone makers. It also indicates that support for Indians will keep getting better in the coming future.

February 25, 2015