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"Hospitals are exploring new uses in intensive care units and surgical recovery rooms, and contemplating a future in which Alexa, or another voice avatar, becomes a virtual member of the medical team - monitoring doctor-patient interactions, suggesting treatment approaches, or even alerting caregivers to voice changes that could be an early warning of a health emergency."

"Vint Cerf says "it's almost criminal" that programmers aren't held accountable to design with disabilities in mind."

"Manufacturers are already looking at ways to protect voice-activated devices. For example, ultrasound attacks could be stymied through detecting frequency alterations in received signals. It would be a nice idea to train all smart devices to recognize their owner's voice, although having already tested this on its own system, Google warns that such security can be fooled by a voice recording or a decent impersonation."

"Likewise, although it is clear that the function of modern virtual assistants are driven by profit, it isn't obvious to the average consumer exactly how their presence is being monetised. "

"A glimmer of hope at CES 2019 came in the form of a new open-source virtual assistant called Mycroft that promises never to collect your personal data. CNet notes that it's still in early development, and it may never challenge Google Assistant or Alexa in general intelligence. But at least the device shows that some in the tech world are starting to regard privacy as a core feature of virtual assistants, rather than an afterthought."

"A voice-controlled virtual assistant-Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or Google Home-is only as good as the data that powers it. Training these programs to understand what you are saying requires a whole lot of real-world examples of human speech." "Developers generally need access to hundreds or thousands of hours of audio, says Alexander Rudnicky, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University" "All of that is privately held, and generally unavailable to academics, researchers, or would-be competitors. That's why Mozilla decided to launch its Common Voice project." "Common Voice invites anyone with an internet connection and a microphone to submit brief recordings of themselves reading particular sentences, all through a couple of clicks or taps on a web browser. " "Mozilla aims to release a version of the dataset later this year and is hoping to have 10,000 hours of audio by that time, the quantity it estimates is enough to train a modern, production-quality system. "

"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."

"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. "

"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."

"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."

"This week, Tom and Carla are very pleased to have Dr. Julie Carpenter with us as our guest. Julie holds a Ph.D. In cognitive science from the University of Washington. Julie is the "Co-Host Emeritus" of the RoboPsych Podcast. After being part of the show for most of 2017, Julie moved to San Francisco to join Accenture in 2018 as a Research Scientist in human-robot/human-technology interaction. Recently, she has been part of the team that developed Q, a genderless voice-interactive platform that was awarded 7 Cannes Lion awards at the recent Cannes Festival."

"- 34% of U.S. 18-29-year-olds owned a smart speaker at the beginning of 2019 while the figure for the over 60 population was just 20%. - The use of voice assistants on smartphones follows a similar pattern but is less extreme with over 80% of under 30 consumers saying they've used a smartphone-based voice assistant compared to about 60% for the oldest age group. - However, the frequency of smart speaker use is less age-dependent as 60 years and older device owners actually exceed that of the 18-29 group with 46.6% as daily users compared to 43.1% respectively. The 30-44 age group was most active with 51.3% daily users. - Consumers over 60 skew significantly toward Amazon Alexa use for smart speakers and Apple Siri on iPhones. Google Assistant and its primary distribution of Google Home smart speakers and Android smartphones are not very popular among older Americans."

"Banking chatbots built with AI technologies can understand the contextual request from a customer. They can be taught to ask and answer questions in a familiar, conversational language. This is something that digital interactions with banks are lacking - a more natural, intuitive user experience."

"Most often, they ask them to play their favorite songs, tell jokes, and sometimes, to do their homework. Of course, chatting with a bot comes with privacy concerns." "Those concerns have created a market for voice assistants that are more kid-friendly and less nosy, such as Chatterbox, a DIY AI for kids, and Toniebox, an entertainment-focused smart speaker that sells in privacy-friendly Europe."

"The Internet has overturned how people shop and reshaped the retail industry. Voice assistants are about to unleash another revolution. As people increasingly shop via the likes of Alexa and Siri, they will tend to demand generic products, starting with everyday items such as batteries and eventually including more complex purchases such as electronics. Digital assistants will use algorithms to compare product specifications, make suggestions, and do comparisons, so that customers can find "the longest-lasting battery pack" or "the cheapest bag of flour." If digital assistants with trustworthy recommendations become a significant source of sales - and we think they will - they could chip away at all but the strongest product brands. Competition will become even more brutal as consumers switch between only one or two verbally suggested options offered by digital assistants - one being their own private label or another low-cost product. Companies that have negotiated with retailers for shelf space up to now will have to find ways to convince the digital assistants to put their products at the top of verbal searches."

"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."

"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". "

"In the past year, natural language models have become dramatically better at the expense of getting dramatically bigger. [...] In response, many researchers are focused on shrinking the size of existing models without losing their capabilities. [...] In addition to improving access to state-of-the-art AI, tiny models will help bring the latest AI advancements to consumer devices. They avoid the need to send consumer data to the cloud, which improves both speed and privacy. For natural-language models specifically, more powerful text prediction and language generation could improve myriad applications like autocomplete on your phone and voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant."

"After being challenged as to whether homeowners should tell guests smart devices - such as a Google Nest speaker or Amazon Echo display - are in use before they enter the building, he concludes that the answer is indeed yes."