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"In a blog post this morning, Amazon details acoustic fingerprinting, a technique Alexa AI research scientists at the Seattle company use to "teach" Alexa what individual instances of its name sound like, so that the assistant can ignore them. The work is applied on the fly to detect when multiple Alexa-enabled devices around the globe hear the same command at roughly the same time - which Mike Rodehorst, machine learning scientist at Amazon's Alexa Speech division, says is needed to prevent Alexa from responding to pranks, references to people named Alexa, and other TV mentions Amazon isn't made aware of in advance."

La graal de la voix selon Amazon : avoir une conversation sans y avoir pensé en terme de programmation de bout en bout. Un film- the night out scenario présenté lors de cette rencontre montre une conversation fluide avec alexa pour commander et réserver plusieurs choses : une place de cinéma, un diner et un taxi. L'objectif est de faire accomplir par l'assistant vocal des taches complexes incorporant plusieurs "skills" et permettant de réduire le nombre d'itérations pour faire des tâches comme réserver une place de cinéma ou commander à manger. La voix définira les contours de la technologie des 10 prochaines années. Je veux utiliser le même assistant sur tous les supports (devices) et non par support : l'assistant de la voiture, l'assistant de la télé,...

"[...]Alexa Conversations, a new deep learning-based approach that developers can use for creating natural voice experiences on Alexa with less effort, fewer lines of code, and less training data than before. This new model helps developers create natural, flexible dialogs within a single skill and in the upcoming releases brings multiple skills into a single conversation. Alexa Conversations is now available in developer preview in the US."

"Amazon's popular voice assistant Alexa ended 2018 with 40,000 developers in India and 20,000-plus skills as the US retail giant raced to capture the smart speaker market in the country." ""We want Alexa to be everywhere. We want anybody, through a voice command, to do any task. Alexa's engineering team builds alarms and shopping lists, but a lot of customer experiences can be built by developers. We don't want to restrict Alexa skills building to only Amazon," said Dilip RS, country manager for Alexa skills, Amazon India."

"The creator of the famous voice assistant dreams of a world where Alexa is everywhere, anticipating your every need." "The crux of the plan is for the voice assistant to move from passive to proactive interactions. Rather than wait for and respond to requests, Alexa will anticipate what the user might want. The idea is to turn Alexa into an omnipresent companion that actively shapes and orchestrates your life. This will require Alexa to get to know you better than ever before." "From a technical perspective, all this would be an incredible achievement. " "From a consumer's perspective, however, these changes also have critical privacy implications. " "Prasad's vision effectively assumes Alexa will follow you everywhere, know a fair bit about what you're up to at any given moment, and be the primary interface for how you coordinate your life. At a baseline, this requires hoovering up enormous amounts of intimate details about your life. Some worry that Amazon will ultimately go far beyond that baseline by using your data to advertise and market to you. "This is ultimately about monetizing the daily lives of individuals and groups of people," says Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a consumer privacy advocacy organization based in Washington, DC."

Les assistants vocaux raviraient les seniors. C'est ce que nous raconte cet article à propos de Leslie Miller, une senior en maison de retraite, qui a des difficultés de vue. "I just love Alexa", elle m'a changée la vie. Le marché des seniors est un marché en pleine croissance, 4600 personnes par jour atteignent l'âge de 65 ans. C'est aussi ce que révèle un pilote méné par un designer pour le compte du gouvernement néerlandais. Les seniors aiment leur AV même si ils ne les comprennent pas toujours (1/3 font remonter la question du sens et mauvaise compréhension des AV). Concernant la question de la vie privée, les résidents comme Miller savent qu'ils peuvent être écoutés, sa maxime est ne dites pas à alexa ce que vous ne voulez pas que le monde sache. Pour ces concepteurs, les AV, n'isolent pas les utilisateurs,70% de l'étude faite dans cette compagnie de résidences pour personnes âgées, se sentent plus proches de leur famille et communauté avec les AV.

"You can train Alexa to recognize you by creating a voice profile. After you set up your profile, Alexa can call you by your name and deliver personalized results based on your voice. Further, Alexa can distinguish your voice from those of other people in the house. Anyone over the age of 13 can create a voice profile."

"These findings reinforce past studies that showed Google Assistant as the clear leader in voice responses, helped by Google's decades of work sorting and organizing internet search results. These studies shows that Google may remain the top contender in voice results for years to come, despite Amazon's work to hire thousands of Alexa engineers and its huge push to expand its voice assistant's capabilities. While Alexa still dominates the US smart speaker market, with about 70% of the devices sold already, Google continues to gain ground and could use its superior tech to eventually beat out Alexa."

"« Alexa, je crois que j'ai la grippe… ». Désormais, les Britanniques peuvent se plaindre à l'assistant vocal d'Amazon de leur état de santé : la Sécurité sociale locale mise sur cette technologie pour dispenser des conseils médicaux."

"Parental supervision via voice assistant won't be limited to what happens at home. Amazon announced that it will roll out new Alexa education skills in partnership with education tech companies like Blackboard, Canvas, and Coursera. Students, and their parents, will shortly be able to ask Alexa about homework or for updates posted by teachers on those platforms to stay up to date on classroom activities." "Amazon wants to increase its market share among children, and make them loyal to the voice assistant at an early age. But with children, parents are the gatekeepers. It remains to be seen if the family-friendly features and increased transparency are enough for parents to trust Alexa interacting with their children after the many privacy breaches. If successful, it could set the template for how voice assistant developers approach the market for the younger audience. Still, there's no guarantee any of it will be enough to appease worried parents or head off the kind of regulation Amazon and other voice assistant makers want to limit."

La croissance des skills d'Alexa montre des signes de ralentissement , avec une comparaison par pays du nombre de skills développées : Les US sont devant, viennent ensuite UK et Inde. Ces données ne concernent pas les données d'usage des skills par jour. La croissance des skills ne dit pas une augmentation de la valeur d'usage de ces skills. Ces données peuvent montrer l'enthousiasme des développeurs pour cette av.

"Multilingual mode is aimed specifically at bilingual homes where two languages are frequently used at the same time. Until now, Alexa could only understand and speak one language at a time, and switching to another language requires adjusting the settings in the Alexa app. In multilingual mode, Alexa can respond to a question in the language it is asked. The setting comes in pairs based on country. For now, it is limited to English and Spanish in the U.S., English and French in Canada, and English and Hindi in India. More languages are currently in the works, according to Amazon."

"Amazon Pay users in India can now ask Alexa to pay their utility, internet, mobile and TV bills, according to TechCrunch. Indian Amazon Pay users can take advantage of the cross-platform functionality with any Alexa-enabled device, not just first-party devices like the company's Echo smart speakers. This means even headphones with Alexa built-in support the functionality."

"Amazon a dévoilé de nouvelles commandes vocales pour Alexa. L'une d'entre elles concerne la vie privée. Grâce à la commande « Alexa, efface tout ce que j'ai dit« , l'assistant vocal supprimera votre historique vocal de la journée, comme le rapporte Engadget. Une fonctionnalité pratique, qui vient remplacer la procédure fastidieuse qu'il est possible de faire de manière manuelle." [...] "Il faut dans un premier temps activer la fonctionnalité, qui ne l'est pas par défaut. Il est ainsi obligatoire si vous souhaitez utiliser la fonctionnalité, de vous rendre dans les paramètres de confidentialité d'Alexa sur l'application ou le site web et activer le paramètre « Activer la suppression par la voix." [...] "Par ailleurs, Amazon a également présenté un « Privacy Hub » permettant aux clients de la firme d'obtenir divers renseignements sur Alexa comme la politique de confidentialité ou encore comment modifier les paramètres de confidentialité. "

"As the number of Alexa devices has exploded, so too have the skills. Amazon now counts 70,000 of them in its stable, from quizzes to games to meditation and more. That's seven times the number it had just under two years ago. It's here, though, that Alexa's room for improvement begins to show. The assistant has gotten better at anticipating what skills people might want to use, but discovery remains a real problem."

"The French version of Alexa was beta tested with Amazon employees in its fulfillment centers and corporate office locations. These conversations helped Alexa understand the nuances of French accents by region, the kind of questions that were commonly asked (for example, cooking and soccer came up an awful lot), and expressions for commonly requested tasks like setting a timer or an alarm."

"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. "

"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

"Amazon announced that it has expanded the option to monetize Alexa skills to Japan late last week. Japan will be only the second country, after the U.S., to allow developers to add in-skill purchasing as an Alexa skill feature."

"The ad is called Morning Ritual which has both a 30 second and minute-long version. Created by ad agency Joint London, the ad walks through a woman's morning routine which includes frequent interactions with the Alexa voice assistant. The viewer only eventually notices the fact that the woman is unable to see, as she faces a rain-soaked window and asks Alexa what the weather is like. The whole visual impairment experience is enhanced by the low-lighting throughout the video."