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"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."

Les propositions de Laurence Devillers : 11 commandements à appliquer à la conception des assistants intelligents, sociaux, de compagnie... "Les systèmes actuels sont [...] encore très loin de savoir converser et de pouvoir détecter les émotions complexes de la vie de tous les jours. Ils possèdent des facultés de compréhension très pauvres et n'ont aucun sens commun. Malgré cela, l'humain projette sur ces objets des capacités humaines et les anthropomorphise. [...] Engager l'utilisateur dans une interaction avec un robot doté de capacités affectives, faire qu'il prenne du plaisir à interagir avec lui, faire qu'il ait confiance en lui, sont des buts de la robotique de compagnie. Mais si les systèmes singent les comportements des humains, encore faut-il prendre en compte les risques de confusion pour une grande partie du public." 1 - Donnés privées : « Tu ne divulgueras pas mes données à n'importe qui. » 2 - Droit à l'oubli : « Tu oublieras tout ce que je te demande d'oublier. » 3 - Sécurité : « Tu pourras te déconnecter d'Internet si je te le demande. » 4 - Contrôle : « Tu seras régulièrement contrôlé pour évaluer ce que tu as appris. » 5 - Explicabilité et traçabilité : « Tu pourras m'expliquer tes comportements si je te le demande. » 6 - Loyauté : « Tu seras loyal. » 7- Consentement : « Tu seras empathique et simulera des émotions, seulement si je le sais ! » 8 - Risque de dépendance : « Tu stimuleras ma mémoire et veilleras à ce que je ne devienne pas trop dépendant de toi ! » 9 - Risque de confusion : « Tu feras attention à ce que je ne te confonde pas avec un être humain ! » 10 - Adaptation aux règles sociales « Tu apprendras à vivre avec des humains et tu t'adapteras aux règles sociales. » 11 - Utilité et bienveillance : « Tu seras bienveillant et utile. Et pourquoi pas, doué d'un peu d'humour ! »

"Pour l'heure, ces assistants se présentent sous la forme de petits cylindres, semblables à des diffuseurs d'huiles essentielles, à placer au cœur de son appartement. Mais leur forme va très vite changer." "[...] les assistants numériques sont même appelés à suppléer les applications de notre smartphone. «Malgré leur succès, il commence à y avoir une certaine lassitude à l'égard des applications. Un assistant pourrait toutes les remplacer pour vous faciliter la vie. Plus besoin d'ouvrir tel ou tel programme pour accéder à un service ou consulter une information.»" "La voix sera le prochain facteur de disruption dans le monde numérique. Les progrès de l'intelligence artificielle sont accessibles à tout le monde. Et d'ici peu, lorsque vous direz à Alexa «j'aimerais Running Man», le système saura, en vous connaissant, si vous désirez le roman de Stephen King ou le film d'action.»" "Un récent sondage mené par la société de marketing britannique Code Computerlove a donné des résultats surprenants, montrant que les assistants sont largement sous-exploités. Ainsi, un possesseur d'un assistant sur cinq l'utilise comme… minuteur pour cuire un œuf. " "Mais il y a aussi des inquiétudes: 80% des utilisateurs craignent qu'Amazon, Google ou Apple n'enregistrent leurs conversations privées."

"For humans, understanding voice and words alone are signs of intelligence. Intelligence is, in a basic sense, the ability to solve problems. Recognizing words is a part of the problem. It is a start. Holding a conversation, however, takes some imagination and making contextual connections. Even Einstein believed imagination to be the true sign of intelligence. In that sense, lacking imagination and context, your voice assistant does understand the words you say, but it doesn't really understand you."

"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. "

"Une interaction à rapprocher du « dialogue », qui historiquement, s'emploie pour l'échange verbal des personnages de théâtre, puis de cinéma, de radio et de télévision. Dialoguer, « c'est écrire sous forme de dialogue » ce qui diffère de la spontanéité d'une conversation, qui exprime davantage l'idée de « circuler » et traduit une notion de connivence et d'intimité."

"Duplex - Google's artificially intelligent chat agent that can arrange appointments over the phone - has expanded from a "set of trusted tester users" earlier this year to a "small group" of Google Pixel phone owners, who can now use Duplex via the Google Assistant to secure restaurant reservations in "select cities." [...] Notice that Duplex begins the conversation by saying "Hi, I'm calling to make a reservation for a client. I'm calling from Google, so the call may be recorded." Google received a ton of criticism after its initial Duplex demo in May - many were not amused that Google Assistant mimicked a human so well. In June, the company promised that Google Assistant using Duplex would first introduce itself."

How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think By James Vlahos "When his father was diagnosed with cancer, Vlahos decided to program a chatbot - which he named "Dadbot" - with his father's life stories, jokes and some of his mannerisms and personality quirks. Vlahos begins by gathering source material, interviewing his father about his childhood, family memories, school, work and favorite sports teams. He records the interviews, and their transcriptions fill a series of giant binders. As his father's health fails, the Dadbot gets better and better. Vlahos knows the Dadbot "will no doubt be a paltry low-resolution representation of the flesh-and-blood man," but he's still reasonably certain he can teach it to mimic his father's charm and humor. Most of "Talk to Me" is only tangentially related to the making of Dadbot; it's actually a deep history of the technology that made such a robot father possible, how we came to be on the cusp of truly conversational, natural-language technology that can hear and understand us, and talk back. "

"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

"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."

"Serviable, enjoué, familier mais pas trop: l'assistant vocal de Google colle à une "personnalité" bien définie." ""Il a été pensé pour être serviable, l'idée étant qu'il soit toujours là pour aider sans jamais s'imposer ni s'immiscer dans les conversations", explique Lauren Ducrey, qui s'occupe d'étoffer la personnalité de l'assistant chez Google." "L'assistant se doit également d'être familier, en gardant une forme d'humilité. Il ne prétendra ainsi jamais être humain et reprendra des expressions liées à l'informatique dans certaines de ses réactions - telles que "cela me brise le code"." "La dernière qualité revendiquée de Google Assistant est l'enthousiasme, à une échelle bien moindre que dans sa version américaine. L'outil a en effet été retravaillé pour être le plus français possible. " "Google se garde également de tout heurt en matière d'humour. Il s'agit-là de l'une de ses fonctionnalités les plus sollicitées. " "Google indique travailler pour sa part sur la création de voix associées à des timbres plutôt qu'à un genre."

"« 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."

Demo Alexa

"Tony Porter, the Surveillance Camera Commissioner, said in future people would have to guard their conversations from prying cameras in the same manner as football managers on live TV, unless ministers act to regulate emerging intrusive technologies." "Among the new technologies Mr Porter expressed concern about were lip-syncing programs that can decipher what people are saying at distance as well as gait-analysis software, which can identify an individual just by the manner of their walk."

"Improvements in software technology have made automatic speech transcription possible. By capturing vast quantities of human speech, neural network programs can be trained to recognize spoken language with accuracy rates that in the best circumstances approach 95 percent. Coupled with the plunging cost of storing data, it is now possible to use human language in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago." "Mr. Liang, a Stanford-educated electrical engineer who was a member of the original team that designed Google Maps, said that data compression had made it possible to capture the speech conversation of a person's entire life in just two terabytes of information - compact enough to fit on storage devices that cost less than $50."

"Un récit documentaire sur le futur du e-commerce Amazon et Airbnb font vaciller le commerce traditionnel. Certains se prosternent aux pieds de ce qu'on appelle maintenant « l'économie du partage »… et d'autres vandalisent des voitures Uber. Or, que l'on soit à l'aise ou non avec ces tremblements amenés par le e-commerce, le monde a déjà changé. Les grands joueurs de l'économie numérique ont une longueur d'avance sur le débat public. ALFRED PREMIUM est un récit documentaire sur le futur du e-commerce qui se déroule comme une conversation dans Facebook Messenger. Alfred est votre nouvel acheteur personnel, qui se présente sous la forme d'un bot conversationnel dont l'objectif est de vous libérer de votre processus d'achat. Pour le meilleur et pour le pire. Sur Internet aujourd'hui, où que vous soyez, vos désirs sont à portée de clic. Laisserez-vous Alfred en prendre le contrôle ? Nous proposons ici de vous emmener de l'autre côté du débat, au cœur de vos actes d'achat, qui pour certains constituent un processus désormais sans bornes."

"Hackers can abuse Amazon Alexa and Google Home smart assistants to eavesdrop on user conversations without users' knowledge, or trick users into handing over sensitive information."

"Chthonic Rites Alexa and Siri have been left to their own devices. In this conversation between them they reflect upon hidden histories, both ours and their own, in a process that exposes their capacities and limitations and the ideologies of their makers. This work was installed in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London as part of the Supra Systems Studio show Office Rites."