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

"Le marché compte quatre acteurs principaux : Apple (Siri), Google (Google Assistant) ), Microsoft (Cortana) et Amazon (Alexa). D'autres initiatives existent et de nombreux assistants se développent avec Facebook (M), Orange et Deustche Telekom (Djingo) ou encore Samsung (Bixby). Le marché pourrait représenter plus de 10 milliards de dollars dès 2020." "Ce nouveau type d'interaction entre l'utilisateur et son équipement terminal apparaît comme plus pratique dans de nombreux cas : en voiture, en déplacement, ou lorsque l'utilisateur est occupé par une autre activité. Néanmoins, l'usage de la voix en public , au travail ou dans les transports en commun semble toujours délicat pour une grande partie des utilisateurs qui ne souhaitent pas voir leurs recherches sur internet exposées en public. Ainsi les assistants, pour convaincre l'ensemble des utilisateurs, pourraient évoluer ou se diversifier plus largement vers des interfaces écrites de type chatbots." "Des assistants vocaux sont aujourd'hui développés sur tous types de supports (ordinateur, smartphones, télévision, véhicule connecté, etc.). La particularité des enceintes connectées est qu'elles reposent uniquement sur de telles interfaces, et ne peuvent donc, par nature, donner accès aux contenus d'internet prenant une forme visible (textes, images, vidéos, jeux vidéo) que sur des écrans déportés (télévision connectée, écran d'ordinateur, smartphone). Lorsqu'elles sont contraintes à une restitution orale, les enceintes connectées ne fournissent souvent qu'un seul résultat pour une requête, choisi par l'algorithme de classement. Si les développeurs d'algorithmes ont tout intérêt à ce que les résultats retournés par leurs outils soient pertinents, il reste que la nécessité d'une réponse unique constitue une restriction structurelle à l'ouverture d'internet." [...]

8 feminist personal intelligent assistant prototypes Designing a Feminist Alexa Seminar UAL Creative Computing Institute and Feminist Internet > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQyKdC37M20&t=876s

podcast CES France Info sur les assistants vocaux français Linto, Vivoka et Snips questions sur la conception... pour des assistants vocaux "gafam free" Linto & Snips btb pour l'instant Vivoka : btbtc (hôtels)

"plus de 1,7 million de Français ont acquis une enceinte à commande vocale, selon une étude Médiamétrie réalisée en décembre 2018."

"Amazon's popular voice assistant Alexa ended 2018 with 40,000 developers in India and 20,000-plus skills as the US retail giant raced to capture the smart speaker market in the country." ""We want Alexa to be everywhere. We want anybody, through a voice command, to do any task. Alexa's engineering team builds alarms and shopping lists, but a lot of customer experiences can be built by developers. We don't want to restrict Alexa skills building to only Amazon," said Dilip RS, country manager for Alexa skills, Amazon India."

"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. "

"Dr. Lam is collaborating with a group of Stanford faculty members and students to build a virtual assistant that would allow individuals and corporations to avoid surrendering personal information as well as retain a degree of independence from giant technology companies." ... "The Stanford researchers are hoping to gain support by making their software freely available to users of smartphones, computers and consumer appliances. They are encouraging makers of consumer products to connect their devices to the Almond virtual assistant through a Wikipedia-style service they call Thingpedia. It is a shared database in which any manufacturer or internet service could specify how its product or service would interact with the Almond virtual assistant."

"These findings reinforce past studies that showed Google Assistant as the clear leader in voice responses, helped by Google's decades of work sorting and organizing internet search results. These studies shows that Google may remain the top contender in voice results for years to come, despite Amazon's work to hire thousands of Alexa engineers and its huge push to expand its voice assistant's capabilities. While Alexa still dominates the US smart speaker market, with about 70% of the devices sold already, Google continues to gain ground and could use its superior tech to eventually beat out Alexa."

"From this week, the voice-assisted technology is automatically searching the NHS Choices website when UK users ask for health-related advice. The Department of Health in England said it could reduce demand on the NHS. Privacy campaigners have raised data protection concerns but Amazon say all information will be kept confidential." "The use of voice search is on the increase and is seen as particularly beneficial to vulnerable patients, such as elderly people and those with visual impairment, who may struggle to access the internet through more traditional means."

"La Ville et la Métropole de Rennes lancent un nouveau service à destination des habitants : Roaz, un assistant virtuel de service public." "Roaz est accessible depuis le site internet metropole.rennes.fr, via un ordinateur ou en version mobile, via Google Assistant ou encore via les enceintes connectées Amazon Alexa et Google Home. Pour faire appel à Roaz sur les enceintes connectées ou via Google Assistant, il suffit d'invoquer « Démarches Rennes Métropole ». Roaz fonctionne de manière textuelle mais aussi vocale, et ce afin de proposer un accès simplifié au service public et aux démarches administratives pour les personnes qui éprouvent des difficultés avec la lecture."

"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."

"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."

> 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. "

"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."

"Amazon Pay users in India can now ask Alexa to pay their utility, internet, mobile and TV bills, according to TechCrunch. Indian Amazon Pay users can take advantage of the cross-platform functionality with any Alexa-enabled device, not just first-party devices like the company's Echo smart speakers. This means even headphones with Alexa built-in support the functionality."

"For now, the startup [Bamboo Learning Inc] is targeting parents and children but says the technology could eventually wind up in schools if it catches on. Persuading parents that Alexa is an appropriate education tool for kids could be tricky. " "Bamboo is hoping that it can carve out a niche as a useful tool for parents who want an educational diversion for their kids on the new voice software. That could mean offering their assistance to more companies like Highlights looking for expertise in educational applications for Alexa. Or, echoing the models of internet giants that rely on user-generated content, they could build out a platform for teachers and schools to build voice tools."