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"You can only understand the voice platform wars by first recognizing that voice assistants, specifically, represent both a platform and user interface (UI) shift comparable to the web and smartphones. The key difference is that these new platforms are neither based on open standards, nor on relatively open access to consumers. Voice assistants introduce a proprietary intermediary into all digital consumer interactions. This scenario both excites and frightens the leading tech companies that carved out enviable positions in the earlier web and smartphone platform wars." "Voicebot subsequently introduced the 5 A's framework for evaluating value segment dominance: Access, Acquisition, Authority, Attention, and Agency." "Each of these segments is again up for grabs in the new voice era. Voice assistants offer easy Access to content. They are being used to Acquire goods, and are a new source of Authority, as they answer billions of questions annually. They are also diverting Attention that previously went to smartphone interactions to new voice interaction properties. This means that each of the winners of the previous web and mobile platform wars has existing territory they must protect. " "Agency is what all of the big winners of the earlier tech platforms fear most. Voice assistants reserve agency for making choices about where answers are sourced (Authority), and can heavily influence content sourcing (Access), such as steering people toward Prime Video or YouTube. They also can order from multiple sources (Acquisition) that are not Amazon.com. And, they introduce new sources of interactions that displace consumer time with media (Attention). Voice assistants are an intermediary. " "Voice assistants are designed to help simplify users' lives. Over time, more and more agency will be granted to voice assistants to simply execute tasks on behalf of the user. The consumer will not necessarily care how the task is fulfilled, just that it gets done. " "If an agen

"-Smart speakers are not broadly useful-most users only use them for a few things-music, timers, alarms, and, in some cases, home automation scenarios. - Voice-only situations are limiting in cases where a visual or hybrid mode is required - media, entertainment, shopping, etc. - Engagement levels with third-party skills are very low (skills offer limited functionality and skills syntax is hard to remember). "I'm sorry, I don't know that" and other Alexa failures are no longer entertaining, but rather frustrating. Even Amazon acknowledges this [https://www.tomsguide.com/us/amazon-alexa-kills-skills,news-28072.html] - Smart speakers are NOT ubiquitous-the speaker on my kitchen counter is not in my car nor in my office!" "Apps - do we need to reinvent the wheel?" "Most people already have their banking, communications, social networking, navigation, travel and payment apps in their smartphones. They already know how to use them (simple). They already know which ones to use for what purpose-Slack for work, WhatsApp for friends, Messenger for family (user choice). They've already registered and set them up and they provide control over what information goes where-for instance, their portfolio may be in their banking app, their contacts are on the phone. They know which app sees what data (privacy). They also trust apps to protect them and their data. Imagine a voice assistant platform that just allows users to use the apps they already use-on-the-go - anytime, anywhere-with simple voice commands, without having to register these service relationships again, and without waiting for the developers to have to reinvent the wheel to plug into the platform. We must embrace mobile app actions as first-class citizens. We should be able to do things in our mobile apps with simple voice commands. We must provide user choice and personalize user experience without registration and without compromising privacy and trust."

"If voicebots provide value, then consumers will not hesitate to use them. [...] But convenience isn't one-sided. It has to be equally convenient for the business and for the consumer. And there are many underlying social, moral and legal implications to consider as this technology matures in support of that balance. How do you ensure a voicebot behaves ethically? How do you prevent inflection and sentiment analysis being deployed to manipulate people during a bot conversation? What do bots do with the information consumers provide? Will they remember credit card numbers? Where does information go? How is it stored? Who and what else can access it? There are severe privacy implications too. In Europe, for example, voicebots must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (which came into force last year)." [...] "And businesses deploying voicebots also had better be prepared for the hefty weight of user expectation. As humans, we are biologically wired to recognize voices and instinctively recall what we can do with the associated persona. " [...] "Even though voicebots are soon going to be everywhere, we are not going to be comfortable talking to them all the time. They will have utility, and they will be more convenient for quick queries and simple tasks. But, being able to talk with a real person about messy human matters has value that a bot can never be trained to manage completely and infallibly. "

"Amazon.com Inc. employs thousands of people around the world to help improve the Alexa digital assistant powering its line of Echo speakers. The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners' homes and offices. The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa's understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands. " "In marketing materials Amazon says Alexa "lives in the cloud and is always getting smarter." But like many software tools built to learn from experience, humans are doing some of the teaching." "In Alexa's privacy settings, the company gives users the option of disabling the use of their voice recordings for the development of new features. A screenshot reviewed by Bloomberg shows that the recordings sent to the Alexa auditors don't provide a user's full name and address but are associated with an account number, as well as the user's first name and the device's serial number." "Apple's Siri also has human helpers, who work to gauge whether the digital assistant's interpretation of requests lines up with what the person said. The recordings they review lack personally identifiable information and are stored for six months tied to a random identifier, according to an Apple security white paper. After that, the data is stripped of its random identification information but may be stored for longer periods to improve Siri's voice recognition. At Google, some reviewers can access some audio snippets from its Assistant to help train and improve the product, but it's not associated with any personally identifiable information and the audio is distorted, the company says. "

"Some companies and scientists present Affective Computing, the algorithmic analysis of personality traits also known as "artificial emotional intelligence", as an important new development. But the methods that are used are often dubious and present serious risks for discrimination. It was announced with some fanfare that Alexa and others would soon demonstrate breakthroughs in the field of emotion analysis. Much is written about affective computing, but products are far from market ready. For example, Amazon's emotion assistant Dylan is said to be able to read human emotions just by listening to their voices. However, Dylan currently only exists in form of a patent. So far, Amazon, Google et al. have not launched such products. Identifying unique signals that indicate that someone is sad seems to be a bit more complicated than they initially thought. Maybe someone's voice sounds depressed because they are depressed, but maybe they are just tired or exhausted. However, these difficulties do not prevent other companies from launching products that claim to have solved these complex problems by using voice and speech for character and personality analysis." > One is the company Precire, based in Aachen, a city on border with Belgium. Their idea: you record a voice sample, and based on the person's choice of words, sentence structure and many other indicators, the software then produces an analysis of their character traits. The software can be used in staff recruitment or to identify candidates for promotion. > critique de la méthode : biais, discrimination...

"The perfect environments for a voice assistant are settings where users want to perform a variety of tasks while keeping their attention on their surroundings, like augmented and virtual reality applications."

"There are a few fundamental reasons why voice shopping has huge potential.[...] - It's faster. We can speak faster than we can type, so using voice is typically quicker than any other modality. For example, in 2018, Virgin Trains in the UK launched an Alexa skill that lets customers book train tickets through Alexa. It takes the average booking time down from 7 minutes online to 2 minutes via voice. The potential to save time is always something that appeals to customers. - It's frictionless. No matter how user-friendly you make your website or app, no matter how much you work on your conversion rate, you're always battling the inherent friction that's built into the device itself. [...] [but] there are challenges for retailers, including: - Data ownership. If you choose to use one of the top two platforms, Alexa or Google Assistant, then they'll ultimately have visibility into all of your skill or action activity, including what your users are asking for and buying. That's pretty compelling competitive intelligence. - Commission. For a truly seamless experience, you'll need to use a native payment service, like Amazon Pay or Google Pay. For that, there's a charge. - Competition. Amazon's aim is to be the place where you can buy anything online. That means that, whether or not you compete with Amazon today, you might tomorrow. Second, there are challenges for consumers, including: - Difficulty browsing. Although we can speak faster than we can type, it's quicker to scan a list of search results than it is to listen to those results read back audibly. This means that general browsing, a common product research behavior, is a challenge on voice. - Difficulty discovering possibilities. Discovering voice applications is a challenge. So finding out what shopping facilities exist on voice and understanding how to access them can be a challenge for some. - Cognitive load. There's also a cognitive load placed on the user in order to access a t

"In a free service, bots call restaurants and make reservations. The technology is impressive, except for when the caller is actually a person." "In other words, Duplex, which Google first showed off last year as a technological marvel using A.I., is still largely operated by humans. While A.I. services like Google's are meant to help us, their part-machine, part-human approach could contribute to a mounting problem: the struggle to decipher the real from the fake, from bogus reviews and online disinformation to bots posing as people." "Google's A.I. is eerily human, when it works" "Duplex needs lots of data to improve" "Duplex is proficient at making a restaurant reservation over the phone, but much like Facebook, Google still leans on human intelligence. At any given moment, it is lifelike. But it struggles to deal with the unexpected. "There are three things that are important when it comes to A.I.'s interactions with humans: context, context and context," said Jerry Kaplan, author of "Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" and a Stanford University lecturer on artificial intelligence. "Machines are very good with detail but terrible at context," he said."

"At January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a boost to the artificial intelligence (AI) that allows smart speakers like the Echo, Google Home, and Apple Homepod to reliably recognize everyday sounds-and to act on them-is set to lend the devices powerful new capabilities, including the ability to recognize your favorite brands from the noises they make." "Are such activities an invasion of your "soundspace"? Schaub thinks so. He predicts, "People will find the detection of what kind of soft drink they are having, based on the sound of opening the can or bottle, very creepy." "That people are unaware their smart speakers could record activity after the device's wake word is uttered is no surprise to Schaub and his fellow researchers. Their survey of smart speaker users showed that consumer rationalizations for installing smart speakers showed "an incomplete understanding of privacy risks" and that they had a misplaced "trust relationship" with the smart speaker companies. Most users, the researchers said, seemed resigned to losing their privacy and accepted it as a cost of using the technology." "Still, voice assistant makers should harbor no illusions that audio data is any less worthy of protection than other forms of data, says a spokesman for the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) in London, which drew up of many of the measures in the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which companies the world over now have to comply with if they want to sell into Britain or Europe."

The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources - By Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler (2018) [...] "At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. Many of the assumptions about human life made by machine learning systems are narrow, normative and laden with error. Yet they are inscribing and building those assumptions into a new world, and will increasingly play a role in how opportunities, wealth, and knowledge are distributed. The stack that is required to interact with an Amazon Echo goes well beyond the multi-layered 'technical stack' of data modeling, hardware, servers and networks. The full stack reaches much further into capital, labor and nature, and demands an enormous amount of each. The true costs of these systems - social, environmental, economic, and political - remain hidden and may stay that way for some time. We offer up this map and essay as a way to begin seeing across a wider range of system extractions. The scale required to build artificial intelligence systems is too complex, too obscured by intellectual property law, and too mired in logistical complexity to fully comprehend in the moment. Yet you draw on it every time you issue a simple voice command to a small cylinder in your living room: 'Alexa, what time is it?" And so the cycle continues."

"Speech-to-text applications are not new to medical staff, who have used transcription software to digitize voice notes recorded on a dictaphone for some time now." "Voice assistants are now available that can input patient notes directly into electronic health record (EHR) systems automatically when dictated by a physician, potentially saving a significant amount of time and effort." "Kara is the first "ambient" AI assistant, meaning it doesn't need to be invoked by the physician using a command word." "[the] patient (...] give their consent for their physician to use the AI assistant" "Saykara is one of a range of software vendors with voice assistants that are targeted specifically at supporting physicians. This includes Suki (which announced $20 million in funding last year), Notable (which attracted $13.5 million in investments last year), Nuance (whose Dragon Medical One is one of a variety of speech applications), and a range of others."

"The AI sausage that voice technology relies on gets made in a feedback loop: The products perform well enough, voice data from customers are collected and used to improve the service, more people buy in to the product as it improves, and then more data are collected, improving it further. This loop requires a large customer base to sustain itself, which raises the question: Would as many people have bought these products if they knew that Romanian contract workers would listen to them, even if they didn't deliberately trigger their devices? " "In a recent article for The New Yorker on the risks of automation, the Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain coined the phrase intellectual debt: the phenomenon by which we readily accept new technology into our lives, only bothering to learn how it works after the fact. Essentially, buy first, ask questions later." "But privacy alone won't solve this. It's just as important for consumers to know how our devices work to begin with."

"Leslie Miller's days are jam-packed. Being legally blind hasn't slowed down the 70-year-old resident of Casa de Mañana Retirement Community in La Jolla, California: she frequently gets lunches with friends, goes dancing, reads, and loves to listen to radio soap operas. Lately, she's gotten into guided meditation. None of that would be possible without Alexa." [...] "We want to meaningfully impact the lives of older adults," Davis Park, the project's executive director, says. Park notes that the voice assistants have been incredibly helpful for those, like Miller, with poor vision, and the project has experimented with using Alexa to help people with dementia know where they are if they are confused about their surroundings." Miller, like most of her fellow residents, finds her Echo Dot helpful for everyday tasks: What's the weather? Remind me of a lunch with so-and-so. What's the definition of this word?"

Video > Amazon's new Echo Loop took a whole Echo speaker and put it into a smart ring. It's part of a program Amazon is calling "Day1," which is code for "here are a bunch of products that are not really ready for mass sales, but we want to put them out there anyway." The first two are smart glasses and a little ring.

"Danielle Reubenstein, executive creative director in the mobile division of the ad agency Possible, said she had been urging brands to view smart speakers as a way to connect with people rather than as a means to sell products - at least for now." "These are still early days for marketing on voice devices. Ms. Reubenstein compared it to when brands began making apps for mobile devices. But over time, she said, voice interactions will begin to replace many of the activities that people are conducting on screens."

"The USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) is a leader in basic research and advanced technology development of virtual humans who think and behave like real people. ICT brings together experts in clinical psychology, cognitive science, computer vision, speech processing and artificial intelligence. This video shows two interactive technologies recently developed for multimodal perception and healthcare support: Multisense automatically tracks and analyzes in real-time facial expressions, body posture, acoustic features, linguistic patterns and higher-level behavior descriptors (e.g. attention, fidgeting). From these signals and behaviors, indicators of psychological distress are inferred to inform directly the healthcare provider or the virtual human. SimSensei is a virtual human platform specifically designed for healthcare support and is based on the 10+ years of expertise at ICT with virtual human research and development. The platform enables an engaging face-to-face interaction where the virtual human automatically reacts to the perceived user state and intent, through its own speech and gestures. Please note that due to privacy concerns, the people shown in this video are actors. SimSensei is not designed for therapy or medical diagnosis, but is intended as a support tool for clinicians and healthcare providers."

"We need some new breakthroughs that fundamentally change the rotten trade-off we now make between privacy and AI. The good news is that there's a growing research effort in what's called "privacy-preserving" machine learning. Academics are trying to develop algorithms that can operate on encrypted data, which means they wouldn't need to access anyone's data directly. Other researchers are figuring out ways to combine insights from different machine-­learning models without needing to merge all their underlying data. Companies like Apple, ­Google, and Microsoft already have teams working on such projects."

"Anything World is a platform that allows you to play with any object you can imagine using the power of your voice. We have combined cutting edge Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Understanding, Computer Vision and extensive 3D libraries to allow you to request, see, manipulate and experience anything you can think of. Simply say what you want, have it appear and then play with it within your 3D world - be that in AR, VR, a game, a simulation..."

"hen you sign up to use Alexa, you agree to be responsible for any purchases made on the device by you, your resident parrot, a mischievous friend or relative, or an unwelcome burglar. It doesn't matter whether you intended the purchase or not."

"Dr. Lam is collaborating with a group of Stanford faculty members and students to build a virtual assistant that would allow individuals and corporations to avoid surrendering personal information as well as retain a degree of independence from giant technology companies." ... "The Stanford researchers are hoping to gain support by making their software freely available to users of smartphones, computers and consumer appliances. They are encouraging makers of consumer products to connect their devices to the Almond virtual assistant through a Wikipedia-style service they call Thingpedia. It is a shared database in which any manufacturer or internet service could specify how its product or service would interact with the Almond virtual assistant."