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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]