Alexa, Can You Hear Me? Making AI Voice Assistants Better for Everyone.

Bold Names

The Wall Street Journal

Technology

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2024

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

AI voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa have become part of our everyday lives. But for people with atypical voices, including those with conditions like Parkinson’s disease and muscular dystrophy, these tools can be frustrating to use. Now a number of big tech companies including Amazon and Google, as well as research organizations are coming up with ways to make them more useful. What will it take to create voice assistants that work for everyone right out of the box? What do you think about the show? Let us know on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or email us: [email protected] Further reading: Tech Firms Train Voice Assistants to Understand Atypical Speech Amazon Makes Alexa Chattier and More Capable Using Generative AI Alexa, Siri, Cortana: Why All Your Bots Are Female Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition (2014, arXiv) Librispeech: An ASR corpus based on public domain audio books (2015, IEEE International Conference) Speech Accessibility Project from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:24.2	Eke slash special offer. Hi Future of Everything listeners a quick note before we start
0:29.8	today's episode we've made a change We're bringing you even more of the original
0:34.1	reporting and interviews you've come to expect. Check us out weekly on Fridays and
0:38.7	let us know what you think. Drop a line to FOE podcast at W.S.J.
0:44.0	Also, just a heads up that we say the names of some common voice assistance several times in this
0:48.8	episode. If it activates one in your home. We apologize.
0:52.8	Michael Cash lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.
0:57.8	I'm hunting on these levels.
1:01.8	I grew up in England. He says he's 49 years old and grew up in England. You might have trouble understanding him because he has cerebral palsy. He says it's how he's always spoken.
1:16.4	He says it's how he's always spoken.
1:18.6	Though his friends and family have always understood him, he says he needed many years of speech therapy to feel confident in speaking with everyone else.
1:25.7	He says, so that they can understand me and my history for his humor.
1:33.8	He says so that they can understand him and his sense of humor.
	...

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