"Julie est micro travailleuse et elle a entraîné Cortana, l'assistant vocal de Microsoft. Nassim lui, était livreur pour Deliveroo et son temps de travail était décidé par un algorithme. Deux histoires de micro travailleurs précaires qui posent d'importants problèmes éthiques."

"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."

> décryptage de l'appel d'offre de l'Education Nationale, concernant la conception, la création et la fourniture d'un assistant vocal pour enseigner l'anglais aux élèves du primaire.

"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."

"Around 7.1 million people in the UK now listen to podcasts each week. That's one in eight people and is an increase of 24% over the past year - and more than double over the past five years. Ofcom research also found that half of listeners have joined the podcast wave in the last two years."

"Si vous avez pris l'habitude d'enregistrer vos conversations, vos cours, vos entretiens ou de prendre des notes rapidement à l'oral, le Pixel 4 pourrait bien changer votre vie." "Les membres d'XDA Developers ont eu l'occasion de tester la fonction de transcription, c'est-à-dire la transformation d'un message oral dicté en texte écrit. " "La transcription de ces mémos vocaux permet une autre révolution : rechercher un mot dans ses enregistrements. Trouve"r une phrase spécifique pendant un entretien ou un cours oblige à l'heure actuelle à réécouter l'intégralité de la conversation." "En cherchant dans le code source, les hackers d'XDA Developers ont découvert qu'il était même possible de faire une recherche par événement sonore. Ainsi il est possible de chercher un bruit de sonnerie de téléphone, un rire, un chien qui aboie ou un sifflement. Un système de notation du temps est aussi disponible. Les YouTubers vont pouvoir très simplement créer leurs sous-titres.

"Google utilisera la reconnaissance vocale pour permettre de déverrouiller l'assistant uniquement lorsqu'il s'agira d'une requête provenant du propriétaire du smartphone." "Par ailleurs, cette nouvelle fonctionnalité viendra une nouvelle fois montrer que Google Assistant est perpétuellement activé en arrière-plan sur le smartphone, et que son micro ne se désactive pas. "

Skoda lance son AV "ok Laura"

"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...

"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."

"First, when you ask questions like "Hey Google, how do you keep my data safe?" the Assistant will share information about how we keep your data private and secure. We're also making it easier to control your privacy with simple voice commands. In the coming weeks, you'll be able to delete Assistant activity from your Google Account just by saying things like "Hey Google, delete the last thing I said to you" or "Hey Google, delete everything I said to you last week." You won't need to turn on any of these features-they will work automatically when you ask the Assistant for help. If you ask to delete more than a week's worth of data from your account, the Assistant will point you directly to the page in your account settings to complete the deletion. We're rolling this out in English next week, and in all other languages next month."

"A day ahead of its annual fall hardware event, Amazon is making a big partnership announcement: it has created the Voice Interoperability Initiative, which is sort of a statement of intent from over 30 different companies that they will strive to ensure devices will work with multiple digital assistants at the same time. For example, you could talk to either Alexa or Cortana on the same smart speaker simply by saying the appropriate wake word." "The idea, these companies hope, is that there will be two kinds of assistants. One type will be broad in its knowledge and capabilities (think Alexa, Siri, and Google), but others will be narrow and deep, context-specific to their domain of knowledge. The goal is to make it possible to directly talk to any of them on a smart speaker without the need for an intermediate skill." "Limp likens his vision for voice assistants to browsers: you can use whatever browser you want to go to whatever website you want, so why can't you use whatever speaker you want to talk to any assistant you want? "

> navigation par la voix en Inde "En Inde, Google Assistant est aussi un service gratuit à appeler avec un téléphone pour les utilisateurs sans connexion à Internet. "

"À sa création, Google Assistant a eu une voix à consonance féminine. Le service pouvait traduire en temps réel, prendre le contrôle d'une enceinte ou encore tirer un coup de feu, mais se limitait à la voix d'une femme. Ce choix n'est pas rare parmi les assistants vocaux, pointés du doigt par les Nations Unies en raison des stéréotypes négatifs qu'ils véhiculent sur les femmes. Google a depuis un certain temps essayé de se démarquer, notamment en proposant des timbres plus masculins aux États-Unis. D'ailleurs, les utilisateurs peuvent opter pour la voix du chanteur John Legend outre-Atlantique. De plus, contrairement à Siri ou Alexa qui ont clairement des noms féminins, Google n'attribue aucun genre à son assistant, malgré sa voix."

"En Chine, la part des personnes âgées risque de doubler dans les années à venir. D'après un article du « South China Morning Post », pour faire face à cette population vieillissante et en perte d'autonomie, le pays mise de plus en plus sur la technologie" "Lanchuang Network Technology s'est déjà emparé du marché. Lancée il y a tout juste quatre mois, l'entreprise basée à Shandong propose un ensemble de gadgets et de services permettant d'aider au maintien de l'autonomie. Composé d'un assistant vocal, d'une télévision équipée de webcam et d'une box connectée, le service Lanchuang propose également l'accès à un portail de télémédecine ainsi qu'à un système d'appel d'urgence. Le tout pour un yuan par jour (environs 13 centimes d'euros). Pour quelques yuans supplémentaires, les utilisateurs peuvent également bénéficier d'un service de ménage et de livraison de repas ainsi que d'un robot de compagnie."

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.

"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."

"Most importantly for those concerned about humans reviewers listening to you, it plans on asking every user to re-affirm their choice to opt-in to that program - which is "paused globally" pending an EU investigation. " "The company is also making other changes, including a new sensitivity option for "Hey Google" hotword detection, so that users who want to can make it less likely that their smart speakers will pick up unintended audio." "Google hasn't provided clear dates for when these new policies will go through, though it did mention some of it will go into effect "later this year.""

"In a recent paper that made waves in the ML community, a team at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, found that training a model for natural-language processing - the field that helps "virtual assistants" like Alexa understand what you're saying - can emit as much as 626,155lb of carbon dioxide. That's about the same amount produced by flying roundtrip between New York and Beijing 125 times." "When it comes to ML, a group of researchers are calling for a more energy-conscious approach, which they call "Green AI". "