The latest customer behavioural trends on voice commerce from the Vixen Labs Voice Commerce Report. read more
Discussing the Voxta platform, voice in India and the value of independent voice assistants. read more
SoundHound Inc is enabling brands like Mercedes and Mastercard to cause disruption with voice AI. Find out how with VP Product Marketing, Mike Zagorsek. read more
It’s ironic, but you might not have a choice about voice.
read moreWith new technology comes new potential for disruption.
read moreYesterday I posted about how speech recognition systems, voice assistants, have trouble with different accents like Irish accents, Welsh accents, Scottish accents, Northern accents and how hard it is to actually train those systems based on accents because a different accent is essentially like a different language. read more
A new study by Uswitch has found that voice assistants struggle with Irish accents… and Welsh, and Scottish. read more
Dive deep into one of the core technologies that underpins the voice assistants you know and love, with one of the world’s leading speech recognition experts, Catherine Breslin.
Sparks is a new podcast player app that lets you learn and retain knowledge while you listen.
The Sparks team are looking for people just like you: podcast listeners who’re also innovative early adopters of new tech, to try the beta app and provide feedback.
Try it now at sparksapp.io/vux
Automatics speech recognition (also known as ASR) is a suite of technology that takes audio signals containing speech, analysis it and converts it into text so that it can be read and understood by humans and machines. It’s the technology that makes voice assistants like Amazon Alexa able to understand what a user says.
There’s obviously a whole lot more to it that than, though. So, in today’s episode, we’re speaking to one of the most knowledgable and experienced speech recognition minds the world has to offer, Catherine Breslin, about just exactly what’s going on under the hood of automatic speech recognition technology and how it actually works.
Catherine Breslin studied speech recognition at Cambridge, before working on speech recognition systems at Toshiba and eventually on the Amazon Alexa speech recognition team where she met the Godfather of Alexa, Jeff Adams. Catherine then joined Jeff at Cobalt Speech where she currently creates bespoke speech recognition systems and voice assistants for organisations.
In this episode, you’ll learn how one of the fundamental voice technologies works, from beginning to end. This will give you a rounded understanding of automatic speech recognition technology so that, when you’re working on voice applications and conversational interfaces, you’ll at least know how it’s working and then be able to vet speech recognition systems appropriately.
Follow Catherine Breslin on Twitter
Listen to Jeff Adams, Founder of Cobalt discuss the Alexa origin story
I’m in Amsterdam today with JP and Jen who are over there looking rather nonchalant not joining me on the escalator, but in Amsterdam in Holland Google, Sorry, Alexa doesn’t exist.
The echo doesn’t exist.
It’s Google Assistant predominantly and I got me thinking about what would you do if those big commercial Voice Assistant platforms just didn’t exist?
Would you do without Google Assistant Siri Alexa,
are there other voice Technologies other platforms that you would use instead and for what use cases?
So JP had mentioned SoundHound for use in the car, you know looking at things like restaurants and navigation.
I think that this one is working nice.
I was talking about Snips before it was acquired being used in home electronic devices like coffee machines
and things like that.
So what other examples Do you have of other Technologies outside of the big commercial Technologies and what are the use cases?
What are they being used for? Let us know?
Voice assistants should change how they interact with users based on how you interact with them and the context you’re in.
For example:
🎧 If I’m walking with my headphones on, and I ask Siri “What was the Boro score at the weekend?” Then I just want the score. Nothing more. Did they win or lose?
🔊 If I’m at home and I ask the same question to my smart speaker then I have a little more time. You can give me some stats, tell me who scored etc.
📺 If I’m in the living room and I ask the same question to Alexa on my TV, then I might want to see some highlights, watch some punditry etc.
This is VUX design 2.0.
So does anyone have any examples of this happening across the main voice assistants or have you included interactions like this in your experiences?
