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"Women Reclaiming AI (WRAI) is an expanding activist artwork, presented as a feminist AI voice assistant, programmed through participatory workshops by a growing community of self-identifying women. Through creating a platform for collective writing and editing, the project co-creates an AI that challenges prescribed gender roles. It is a response to the pervasive depiction of AI voice assistants gendered as women, subordinate and serving. Designed by development teams which lack diversity, these systems are embedded with unrepresentative world views and stereotype in ways that reinforce traditional gender roles. WRAI aims to reclaim female voices in the development of future AI systems by empowering self-identifying women to harness conversational AI as a medium for protest. This project is created by artists-technologists Coral Manton and Birgitte Aga in collaboration with an ever evolving community of self-identifying women."

"In her talk, called "Memoirs of Geisha: Building AI without gender bias," [Laura Andina, a Product Manager at Telefonica Digital] explained AI's gender bias by taking a look at Apple's pioneering of skeuomorphic design - a design method that replicates what a product would look like in real-life, as well as taking into account how the physical product would be used." "Receptionists, customer service representatives, and assistants have traditionally been female-dominated careers. Women have had to be helpful, friendly, and patient because it's their job. The skeuomorphic design of an AI assistant therefore would be female. For Andina, it's essential to break these gender biases in design to be able to make real-world changes. If new technology would stop peddling old stereotypes, women would have an easier time moving up the ranks professionally without being cast as assistants or any other "helpful" stereotype." "To avoid hardwiring sexism and gender bias into our future, one possible solution, according to Andina, would be providing a genderless voice for AI technology. But it won't be easy to make - most genderless voices sound too robotic. Human-sounding voices are more trustworthy, so this could deter users."

"Unless there is a strong enough economic argument, don't expect big companies to rush into producing Welsh, Gaelic or Cornish speech systems. Even tech giant Samsung hasn't yet managed to produce a UK-English speaking version of their Bixby assistant (international English speakers need to speak to it in fake American accents to get it to work). " "Research on brain-like learning algorithms may just hold the key here. This is technology that can continually learn during use, just like humans learn to speak a new language. It is unlike most current AI systems that are trained in the lab, before being let loose in the wild - apart from a few exceptions some, like Microsoft's Tay, notable for their spectacular failures. Future systems will be able to gradually acquire skills in a second language just by having users gradually introduce more and more of that language in their daily interactions. Rather than funding research into Welsh speech AI, the Welsh government may well do better by backing research into this new kind of adaptive learning technology."

"Cisco has added new features to its AI voice assistant for Webex that will make it easier for users to start meetings and place calls. The vendor also revealed plans this week at the Enterprise Connect conference to update Webex Meetings with facial recognition and other AI features in the coming months."

"Often called a "Siri for education," AI assistants provide students with two necessary components for learning: immediate response and objective feedback. Digital voice assistant tutors focus on niches like learning English or studying a specific subject." > https://edwin.ai/ > http://www.ailearn.co/business-english/ > https://www.cognii.com/technology [...] "With the advent of edtech startups seeking a place as a tutor in classrooms and during personal study time, it won't be long before the tech titans Apple and Amazon turn toward the development of AI tutors created exclusively for learners looking for personal assistance. Your next tutor may be an AI voice assistant."

"In the past year, natural language models have become dramatically better at the expense of getting dramatically bigger. [...] In response, many researchers are focused on shrinking the size of existing models without losing their capabilities. [...] In addition to improving access to state-of-the-art AI, tiny models will help bring the latest AI advancements to consumer devices. They avoid the need to send consumer data to the cloud, which improves both speed and privacy. For natural-language models specifically, more powerful text prediction and language generation could improve myriad applications like autocomplete on your phone and voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant."

page 15 "[...], we are also seeing personal assistants, like Alexa and Siri, seeking to pick up on the emotional undertones of human speech, with companies even going so far as to patent methods of marketing based on detecting emotions, as well as mental and physical health. The AI-enabled emotion measurement company Affectiva now promises it can promote safer driving by monitoring "driver and occupant emotions, cognitive states, and reactions to the driving experience...from face and voice." Yet there is little evidence that any of these systems actually work across different individuals, contexts, and cultures, or have any safeguards put in place to mitigate concerns about privacy, bias, or discrimination in their operation. Furthermore, as we have seen in the large literature on bias and fairness, classifications of this nature not only have direct impacts on human lives, but also serve as data to train and influence other AI systems. This raises the stakes for any use of affect recognition, further emphasizing why it should be critically examined and its use severely restricted."

"F'xa is built with feminists values in mind and every response given holds up to feminist beliefs that avoid reinforcing bias and stereotypes. F'xa was created by a diverse team using the Feminist Internet's Personal Intelligent Assistant Standards and Josie Young's Feminist Chatbot Design research. In preparation for building F'xa, Young explored contemporary feminist techniques for designing technology called the Feminist Chatbot Design Process - a series of reflective questions incorporating feminist design, ethical AI principles, and research on de-biasing data. Using a smartphone, the bot works to ensure designers don't perpetuate gender inequalities into their chatbots and educates users on how current voice assistants give gender equality a bleak future. "

"Banking chatbots built with AI technologies can understand the contextual request from a customer. They can be taught to ask and answer questions in a familiar, conversational language. This is something that digital interactions with banks are lacking - a more natural, intuitive user experience."

"Emotion-classifying AI isn't anything new, but traditional approaches are supervised, meaning that they ingest training data labeled according to speakers' emotional states. Scientists at Amazon took a different approach recently, which they describe in a paper scheduled to be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Rather than sourcing an exhaustively annotated "emotion" corpus to teach a system, they fed an adversarial autoencoder a publicly available data set containing 10,000 utterances from 10 different speakers. The result? The neural network was up to 4% more accurate at judging valence, or emotional value, in peoples' voices." https://developer.amazon.com/fr/blogs/alexa/post/2d8c2128-eec9-44cc-9274-444940eb0a4d/using-adversarial-training-to-recognize-speakers-emotions

"On December 2 at the 2018 Neural Information Processing Systems conference, one of the largest annual gatherings for AI research, Alibaba demoed the AI customer service agent for its logistics company Cainiao. Jin Rong, the dean of Alibaba's Machine Intelligence and Technology Lab, said the agent is already servicing millions of customer requests a day."

Every answer from a conversational agent is a sign that algorithms are becoming a tool of soft power, a method for inculcating particular cultural values. While conversational AI agents can reiterate stereotypes and clichés about how emotions should be treated, mood-management apps go a step further - making sure we internalise those clichés and steer ourselves upon them. The upbringing of conversational agents invariably turns into the upbringing of users. It's impossible to predict what AI might do to our feelings. Interacting with and via machines has already changed the way that humans relate to one another.

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."

"Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) struggles in the absence of an extensive volume of training data. We present SpecAugment, a new approach to augmenting audio data that treats it as a visual problem rather than an audio one."

"Users of Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant conceptualize them in one of 3 ways: an interface, a personal assistant, or a brain. Frequent users are less likely to push the interaction limits of these AI systems than new users."

"Female owners of smart speakers are more likely than men to report that their device fails to understand their commands, according to a recent study of 1000 British smart speaker owners by YouGov." "The researchers also found that women tend to speak more politely to their smart speakers, with "45% saying they "always" or "often" say 'please' and 'thank you', compared to only 30% of male owners"." "This discrepancy between male and female users could be a result of bias at the point of training AI assistants like Alexa or Siri; if programmers train the AI to respond to mainly male voices, it may have trouble recognizing female voices in the future. Not everyone believes this to be the case however. In its reporting of the study, the Evening Standard cites a blog post by founder and CEO of R7 Speech Sciences, Delip Rao, who believes that the discrepancy is down to technological issues rather than gender bias. "

"Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a new tool to monitor people for cardiac arrest while they're asleep without touching them. A new skill for a smart speaker - like Google Home and Amazon Alexa - or smartphone lets the device detect the gasping sound of agonal breathing and call for help. "

"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."

> concept de l'alignement