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"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."

"This study investigated the speech recognition abilities of popular voice assistants when being verbally asked about commonly dispensed medications by a variety of participants. " "Overall, these findings demonstrated that Google Assistant possesses a much more advanced AI system than its voice assistant competitors when comprehending medication names, but there is still room for improvement. Voice assistants and proper speech recognition in healthcare has the potential to deliver efficient and important health information to patients, especially to those with reduced ability to read small font of medication labels or type on a mobile device.13 However, the presence of a human transcriber for quality assurance is still vital when assessing something as important as the information related to complex medications.14 Future advancements of this technology are critical if it should be used to achieve the comprehension levels of a human healthcare practitioner."

"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."

"Brain-computer interfaces are developing faster than the policy debate around them It's time to talk about what's possible - and what shouldn't be"

"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."

"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

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."

"Voice search may also make it easier for a customer to leave reviews, as well as increase the importance of them. Rather than having to log in and type out a review, it can be as simple as your device asking you, "How do you like the backpack you ordered? How many stars would you give that product?" This becomes important when it comes time to shop: Nearly 85% of voice shoppers are confident in the recommendations given to them by their digital assistants. Having great reviews will be more important than ever -- otherwise, a product runs the risk of never being seen by the voice shopper." "My biggest advice to brands is to start by having a defined voice engine optimization strategy. Once you define your strategy, you should work on building a keyword list specific to voice search. "

"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."

"While people are certainly enthusiastic about the new technology, it's not exactly life-changing yet." [...] "There's always been a tendency to force the 'old' onto the 'new' when it comes to emerging technology platforms - the first ads on television, for example, were essentially radio ads, read out loud," Until we find the app, use-case or invention that could only be possible using voice, we're still just repurposing online content for your ears."

"Some companies are already working to develop more individualized software. Voiceitt, a startup, is currently beta-testing a speech-recognition app that translates nonstandard speech to standard speech in real time using a closed dictionary. "

"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."

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 goal is to create a personality but not to trick the user into thinking they are talking to a human being. For example, Amazon's Alexa never refers to itself as a human but rather as digital entity. The overall goal is to leverage the communication system that users learned first and know best: conversation."

"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."

> la BBC ne met plus ses podcasts à disposition des services google podcast ou google assistant "You might have also seen that our podcasts are no longer available on certain Google products - including the Google Podcast app and Google assistant. I want to explain a little bit about why that has happened. Last year, Google launched its own podcast app for Android users - they've also said they will launch a browser version for computers soon. Google has since begun to direct people who search for a BBC podcast into its own podcast service, rather than BBC Sounds or other third party services, which reduces people's choice - an approach that the BBC is not comfortable with and has consistently expressed strong concerns about. We asked them to exclude the BBC from this specific feature but they have refused. As a public service, we want our content and services to be available to as many people as possible and we make these available for free on a range of third-party apps. But as the BBC, funded by the licence fee payers in the UK, we have to ensure it is done in a way that is good for all audiences, according to our Distribution Policy - which has been agreed with Ofcom." "We also want to make our programmes and services as good as they can possibly be - this means us getting hold of meaningful audience data. This helps us do a number of things; make more types of programmes we know people like, make our services even more personalised and relevant to people using them, and equally importantly, identify gaps in our commissioning to ensure we're making something for all audiences. Unfortunately, given the way the Google podcast service operates, we can't do any of the above."

https://www.wired.com/story/the-genderless-digital-voice-the-world-needs-right-now/ "[...] a group of linguists, technologists, and sound designers-led by Copenhagen Pride and Vice's creative agency Virtue-are on a quest to change that with a new, genderless digital voice, made from real voices, called Q. Q isn't going to show up in your smartphone tomorrow, but the idea is to pressure the tech industry into acknowledging that gender isn't necessarily binary, a matter of man or woman, masculine or feminine." "[...] there's a sweet spot between 145 and 175 hertz, a range that research shows we perceive as more gender-neutral. Go higher and you'll perceive the voice as typically female; go lower and it becomes more masculine."

> 2019 Voice report: Consumer adoption of voice technology and digital assistants https://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/insights/2019-voice-report "Forty-one percent of voice assistant users are concerned about trust, privacy and passive listening, according to a new report from Microsoft focused on consumer adoption of voice and digital assistants. And perhaps people should be concerned - all the major voice assistants, including those from Google, Amazon, Apple and Samsung, as well as Microsoft, employ humans who review the voice data collected from end users."

"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."