HyperVoix

"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

"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."

"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."

"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. "

"Think of this as voice assistive technology as opposed to a voice assistant technology. Voice Control is a good name for it. The man employs voice to navigate a user experience originally designed for visual interaction." "There will be more multimodal interaction that joins voice and visual navigation over the next few years. Apple is already demonstrating a model that can work from both an architecture and user experience standpoint." > https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=64&v=aqoXFCCTfm4

La voix de djingo expliquée par Pascal Taillard designer sonore chez Orange : une voix avec des interjections pour plus d'humain mais pas trop avec des sons, pour rappeler la relation humain machine.

"[...]Alexa Conversations, a new deep learning-based approach that developers can use for creating natural voice experiences on Alexa with less effort, fewer lines of code, and less training data than before. This new model helps developers create natural, flexible dialogs within a single skill and in the upcoming releases brings multiple skills into a single conversation. Alexa Conversations is now available in developer preview in the US."

"- Most notably, the Echo Show 5 has a mechanical slide that lets you close the shutter on its front-facing camera, something that previous Echo Shows didn't have. ... -One of the new privacy features from Amazon is the "Alexa Privacy Hub," a kind of one-stop shop on the web for all Alexa-related privacy settings. Amazon says this is where users will go to manage their own privacy settings by time frame and by device. ... -And you can now use voice control to clear Alexa's equivalent of your browsing history. ... [...] these tools still put the burden of responsibility largely on the customer."

"Les enceintes connectées et leurs assistants vocaux sont en plein développement et ils posent la question de l'utilisation de nos données personnelles... En Europe, 6 équipes de scientifiques se donnent 3 ans pour mettre au point une alternative européenne à ce système pour qu'il soit plus sécurisé et respectueux des données privées... Ce projet est coordonné par Emmanuel Vincent, chercheur à l'Inria Nancy-Grand Est. "COMPRISE" (COst-effective, Multilingual, PRIvacy-driven voice-enabled SErvices) , une Action Recherche et Innovation (Research and Innovation Action - RIA) financée par le programme Horizon 2020 de l'Union européenne"

"Ce projet de puce émotionnelle, ce n'est pas totalement de la science-fiction. La société Amazon planche actuellement sur un appareil capable de reconnaître les émotions humaines dans les intonations de la voix."

"Hadopi et le CSA distinguent par ailleurs 3 grandes catégories d'usagers : les profils domotiques, les expérimentateurs ludiques et les profils « contenus »." ... " « Les usages actuels répondent principalement à des besoins fonctionnels de gain de temps ou de simplicité d'utilisation« , indique le rapport. Ainsi la météo et la recherche d'information sont les activités les plus pratiquées par les utilisateurs d'enceintes connectées. Viennent ensuite la lecture de musique ou de la radio et les usages en lien avec la domotique qui, malgré un développement un peu timide dans les foyers, suscitent très largement la curiosité des utilisateurs."

"[...] kick off Waze-specific features like reporting accidents and construction, checking for alternate routes, avoiding tolls, and previewing upcoming traffic with utterances like "Hey Google, report construction" and "Hey Google, avoid tolls."

"Un nouveau synthétiseur vocal, capable de copier la voix de n'importe qui au monde, vient de voir le jour. Ce petit bijou technologique est le fruit des équipes de recherche de la division IA de Facebook. Une machine appelée MelNet, qui ouvre le spectre d'une nouvelle ère des contenus audio."

"Patients can tell Alexa to ask for specific help, such as pain medication or assistance using the bathroom. The skill will then send their request to their nurse via a mobile device and a tablet at the nurse's station. For patients unable to find or reach the standard call button, a voice-activated system can be a real boon. And, because the specifics of the request are shared, the skill is more efficient than a call button. Nurses will know what the patient needs before they arrive and its severity - if it's an emergency or a less life-threatening need. "

"Beaucoup de microtravailleurs sont aussi mis à contribution pour écouter ce que les enceintes connectées ont enregistré et vérifier que l'assistant vocal a correctement interprété une commande. Pendant longtemps, ce travail a été délocalisé, mais il a tendance à être relocalisé, notamment sur ce type de tâche, en raison du savoir nécessaire pour l'effectuer : il faut être capable de comprendre la langue, mais aussi les particularismes régionaux, les accents, le contexte." "Ce travail a de fortes chances de s'inscrire dans la durée. Il est nécessaire avant et après le déploiement des IA : avant pour les mettre au point, après pour les réentraîner. Quand vous ajoutez de nouveaux services à un assistant vocal, par exemple, il devra reconnaître de nouvelles commandes, de nouvelles instructions orales."

"Amazon announced that it has expanded the option to monetize Alexa skills to Japan late last week. Japan will be only the second country, after the U.S., to allow developers to add in-skill purchasing as an Alexa skill feature."

"[...] 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."

"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."