p58 "Le micro-travail pour « vérifier » l'IA "J. : la femme qui écoutait les robots" "[...] comment différencier une IA qui fonctionne de manière automa-tique et une IA qui fonctionne sur la base de l'intervention humaine réalisée en temps réel ?"

"Amazon développe actuellement un accessoire connecté dont la fonction est de reconnaître les émotions de son porteur, affirme Bloomberg. Porté au poignet, l'engin serait pourvu de micros et fonctionnerait en association avec une application installée sur un smartphone. Il déterminerait l'état d'esprit de l'utilisateur en s'appuyant sur la tonalité de sa voix. On ignore si les résultats sont fiables, mais une phase de test serait d'ores et déjà en cours d'après une source anonyme proche du programme."

"[...] fears of a dystopian AI future are also swirling around Amazon's facial recognition software system Rekognition, which the company reportedly attempted to sell to U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and which has been tested by law enforcement in Washington and Oregon. While the public is currently focused on the use of Rekognition by law enforcement and government agencies, there is another issue to consider. If the technology becomes a standard part of the smart display experience, people may balk at the idea of installing Amazon's technology in their homes."

"L'UNESCO s'alarme de la prolifération d'assistants vocaux (Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant) programmés pour avoir une voix féminine par défaut, une « personnalité docile », et pour répondre de façon évasive et joueuse aux insultes ou provocations à caractère sexuel. Ou comment des outils du quotidien auxquels des centaines de millions de personnes s'adressent tous les jours peuvent renforcer les préjugés sexistes associant les femmes au statut d'assistantes zélées." "Le marché est aujourd'hui dominé par quatre assistants, via lesquels se font 90% des interactions vocales dans la plupart des pays. Alexa (Amazon), Cortana (Microsoft), Siri (Apple) et le Google Assistant ou Google Home. Leurs noms sont, pour trois d'entre eux, féminins - Alexa est une référence à la grande bibliothèque d'Alexandrie, Cortana est un personnage de la série de jeux vidéo Halo qui apparaît sous la forme d'une femme svelte au corps transparent, Siri signifie « belle femme qui vous mène à la victoire » en norvégien - mais surtout, leurs voix sont systématiquement définies comme féminines par défaut, à l'exception de Siri dans quatre langues : arabe, hollandais, anglais (d'Angleterre) et… français. L'option de voix masculine a été ajoutée sur Siri en 2013, et sur Google Assistant en 2017. En revanche, elle n'existe pas pour Cortana ni Alexa." "L'Unesco recommande de poursuivre les recherches sur le rôle joué par les nouveaux produits d'intelligence artificelle dans la propagation ou le renforcement des biais sexistes, de proposer au minimum une voix féminine et une voix masculine et d'étudier la possibilité de développer une voix « non genrée » pour les assistants vocaux. "

"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."

"With "Project Alias," Bjørn Karmann and Tore Knudsen of Denmark demonstrated a simple yet effective way to take back control over our own private sphere, which earned them the STARTS Prize of the European Commission." "None of us had any smart home devices for a long time, and we were certainly not planning to buy one either. But after Bjørn won Google's AI Experiment Challenge back in 2017 he got a Google Home smart device as a gift from the I/O event. Despite the lack of excitement, Bjørn brought it home for a trial period. It did not take long before frustrations started to build up, and empathy towards the uncanny voice disappeared. Every interaction and behavioral pattern felt predetermined. He felt like a passive consumer who just wanted to give the poor assistant a name that was not the company's brand. And then there was the microphone. A direct link to the servers at Google that always was on and ready to be triggered by your command. So the idea of hacking it started to arise. But as makers, we had to face the sad truth that it was yet another device with a completely closed system. To hack it, we would have to get creative. This is when the idea of a "man-in-the-middle-attack" started. A device that we would trust and which has no connection to the internet. Whose job is to take control of the other assistant and whose name it would deserve."

"Le droit à l'image d'une personne physique inclut donc également le droit à sa voix." "Dans ses articles 226-1 et suivants, le Code pénal instaure une protection de la vie privée qui est à rapprocher du secret des correspondances (comme spécifié dans l'article L.33-1 du Code des postes et des communications électroniques)." "[...]si la multiplication des interfaces de collectes de nos voix et la réalisation de traitements effectués en grande partie à distance n'est pas sans poser de question, le droit propose déjà une panoplie de solutions réglementaires permettant d'encadrer ces usages. Il convient néanmoins de demeurer vigilant au regard des enjeux importants que la massification des traitements automatiques de la parole peuvent faire peser sur les individus."

"Comcast is working on an in-home device to monitor people's health, and aims to begin pilot-testing it later this year." [...] "Unlike most home speakers, the device won't be positioned as a communications or assistant tool, and won't be able to do things like search the web or turn lights on and off. But it will have a personality like Alexa and it will be able to make emergency phone calls in the case of a health event, the people said."

"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

"The UNESCO report asks developers to design a neutral machine gender for voice assistants, which are programmed to discourage gender-based insults. Technology firms should also emphasise to the public that voice assistants are non-human." https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367416.page=1

"Spotify is about to begin publicly testing its first hardware: a voice-controlled smart assistant for cars, meant to help Spotify learn how people consume audio while they're driving. As part of the test, some Premium users will receive the device for free. The device, called Car Thing, plugs into a vehicle's 12-volt outlet (aka a cigarette lighter) for power and connects to both a person's car and phone over Bluetooth. The device can be activated by saying, "Hey, Spotify," followed by a request for whatever the person wants to hear. It'll be linked to a user's Spotify account, so they can access their playlists." [...] "While smart assistant companies want access to drivers' in-car data, carmakers themselves are developing their own smart assistants and voice controls, too. But in a survey by JD Power, 76 percent of car owners said they're interested in having the same brand voice assistant in their home and in their car. Spotify could face an uphill battle if it wants to convince its users to give up the assistant they're already used to in order to play audio more seamlessly from their Spotify account."

"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

"Le New Scientist nous explique ainsi qu'il existe trois hypothèses sur la naissance de cette faculté. Le langage peut trouver son origine dans la musique et le chant (c'était la théorie de Darwin lui-même. Il pensait que la parole était issue des chants utilisés pour attirer des partenaires sexuels, comme le font les oiseaux, mais également nos cousins lointains, les gibbons). Une autre hypothèse voit dans la gestuelle la source de nos facultés linguistiques. Mais, nous explique le New Scientist, cela n'explique pas pourquoi nous serions passés ensuite à la parole. Une troisième hypothèse suggère que le langage dérive des onomatopées et notre capacité à imiter le cri des animaux ou les bruits qu'ils génèrent. Mais là encore, une question se pose : comment assigner un son à un objet immobile, à un animal silencieux, ou même à un concept abstrait ? " "Peut-être plus facilement qu'on ne le pense. En effet, deux scientifiques britanniques Gary Lupyan (@glupyan) et Marcus Perlman (@MarcusPerlman) ont lancé une compétition dans laquelle les participants devaient imiter par onomatopées des termes, comme « cuisiner », « se rassembler », « couteau » ou « fruit ». Il s'est avéré que non seulement ils y arrivaient assez bien, mais que lorsque les enregistrements furent écoutés par d'autres sujets, ceux-ci purent souvent deviner leur signification."

"la philosophe, historienne des sciences et biologiste américaine Donna Haraway [avec son] Manifeste cyborg, essai iconoclaste publié en 1985, a eu une influence décisive sur l'exploration des rapports entre genre et technologie et l'émergence du cyberféminisme." "Et propose une orientation féministe pour l'avenir : l'utopie d'un monde post-genre où ces rapports seraient subvertis par le trouble que sèment les nouvelles technologies dans les distinctions occidentales traditionnelles entre des duos de notions tels que naturel et artificiel, corps et esprit, physique et non physique, homme et femme, ou encore humain et animal, comme en témoigne le dernier essai de Haraway, le Manifeste des espèces compagnes (Flammarion), paru en janvier, qui explore les dimensions éthiques et politiques des relations que nous entretenons avec les autres êtres vivants." "Autant de preuves de l'actualité de la pensée de Haraway, à une époque où les études d'ingénierie sont très majoritairement masculines en Europe et aux Etats-Unis, où l'histoire de l'informatique met souvent de côté ses pionnières, Ada Lovace, Hedy Lamarr ou Jean Bartik, et où les assistants vocaux Siri et Alexa, avec leurs voix et noms féminins, s'affichent comme les avatars virtuels de la dactylographe, de la bonne ou de la ménagère du nouveau millénaire."

"With a camera, the Nest Hub Max can now recognize your face when you arrive home and will bring up a personalized home page, such as calendar notifications or your own photos for the background slideshow. The feature is called Face Match, that Google says the device processes facial data locally and does not upload it to the cloud." "You can also use the Nest Hub Max to make video calls, like other smart displays with Amazon Alexa. (Google's device uses Duo for those calls.) Google says you'll always know when the camera is on when the light is lit in green. " "To stop the Nest Hub Max from playing audio, video, or from speaking, you can also just raise your hand to end whatever it's doing."

"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. "

"In particular, Google is making a big push to shift machine learning operations from the cloud onto peoples' mobile devices. This should allow ML-powered applications to be faster, more private, and able to operate offline."

"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