How to start a Drop In from the Alexa app. To Drop In to a contact from your smartphone, just head to the Alexa app and go to the Conversations tab at the bottom. You'll see that big Drop In button, which you tap to see a quick list of all Alexa devices you're cleared to access. This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only. Apple may provide or recommend responses as a possible solution based on the information provided; every potential issue may involve several factors not detailed in the conversations captured in an electronic forum and Apple can therefore provide no guarantee as to the.
What's the most exciting trend in voice assistant software?
The proliferation of the hardware that will run it.
Far from being limited to the Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Apple HomePod (and Siri), modern AI voice assistants are now working their way into everything from cars to fridges to watches.
Convert windows to mac os. And as the market expands at an incredible rate, a race is developing between software giants. Every one of these giants is determined to become the default voice assistant for smart devices all over the world.
To a large extent, the winner will be determined by the outcome of the ongoing battle for ownership of the new smart speaker space. These centralized hubs are intended to act as expansion points for the so-called 'smart home,' and they will naturally integrate more easily with devices that run the same voice control AI.
Consumers are currently deciding the future of the smart home, and of voice assistants, through these early-stage speaker purchases.
Why Language Support Matters
A cursory look at the feedback for these flagship products, both professional and user-generated reviews, shows precisely what the most important differentiators are when buying.
Beyond pure brand loyalty, consumers universally claim that their reaction to a particular smart home product derives from the speed and accuracy of its understanding of their speech, and the naturalism of the voice it uses to respond.
Across languages, dialects, and accents, consumers want a voice assistant that both understands them and speaks to them understandably.
The companies that continue to invest the most proactively in the development of wide language and accent support will pull ahead in the minds of consumers, cementing their place as the backbone of the future smart home.
Once that's done, it will be much more difficult for new challengers to enter the market without that enormous base of linguistic information already in hand.
Amazon Alexa Language Support
What languages does Alexa support?
As of March 2020, Amazon Alexa supports 8 languages:
- English
- French
- German
- Hindi
- Italian
- Japanese
- Portuguese (Brazilian)
- Spanish
What dialects does Alexa support?
Alexa supports different dialects in English, French, and Spanish:
- English dialects (5): Australia, Canada, India, UK, US
- French dialects (2): Canada and France
- Spanish dialects (3): Spain, Mexico, US
Alexa Future Outlook
This represents a huge proportion of the current market for smart devices, but it also leaves significant room for expansion in the future.
Amazon has clearly put a lot of work into language support in other forms, such as Amazon Polly, which reads text aloud in 24 languages, but the company will have to continue to invest in bringing that research to bear on the home assistant market.
Google Home Language Support
What languages does Google Home support?
As of March 2020, Google Assistant supports 44 languages on smartphones, whereas the Google Home currently supports thirteen total languages:
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- French
- German
- Hindi
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Norwegian
- Portuguese (Brazilian)
- Spanish
- Swedish
What dialects does Google Home support?
Google Home supports different English, French, Spanish, and German dialects:
- English dialects (6): Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, UK, US
- French dialects (2): Canada and France
- Spanish dialects (3): Mexico, Spain, US
- German dialects (2): Austria, Germany
Google Home Future Outlook
Google is one of the world's most energetic spenders when it comes to software development, and it was revealed in 2018 that the company planned to have more than 30 languages enabled by the end of 2018. As of fall 2020, they're less than halfway to that target on the Google Home, but they've achieved support for 44 languages on the Google Assistant, so it's clear they plan on expanding their language support.
Apple HomePod & Siri Language Support
What languages does Siri support?
As of March 2020, Apple's Siri voice assistant supports 21 languages:
- Arabic
- Cantonese
- Danish
- Dutch
- Finnish
- English
- French
- German
- Hebrew
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Malay
- Mandarin
- Norwegian
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Russian
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Thai
- Turkish
What dialects does Siri support?
It also supports a variety of dialects for Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
HomePod & Siri Future Outlook
Apple holds an impressive lead, but with Google investing heavily it won't be enough unless Apple continues to push forward. HomePod launched with English-only support only, but expanded to English, French, and Spanish in 2018.
Mac os x reformat hard drive. We don't expect it will take long before Siri's full language abilities will be brought over to the HomePod as well.
Why is teaching voice assistants a new language so hard?
Right now, Siri's clear lead in language support is driving success in markets that Apple's competitors simply cannot touch—but Google is close on Apple's tail. How to erase flash drive mac.
Meanwhile, Business Insider believes that Alexa's relative lack of language options is 'significantly limiting its global reach.' With language so clearly at the heart of the fight for living-room dominance, the question becomes why don't more companies develop wider and more robust language abilities.
The clearest answer, it turns out, actually came in 2017, from Google itself.
Automatic Speech Recognition & Natural Language Understanding
Google has actually been developing the basic databases for expanded language support for years, thanks in large part to the background data gathering done by its flagship Search product.
This is why Google may very well overtake Apple's enormous lead: it has already put in the work of creating an enormous backlog of more than 115 languages capable of automatic speech recognition (ASR) through Google Home.
With this ability in hand, localization of Home can often proceed with half the normal amount of effort, since the voice assistant only needs to build an understanding of the intent behind the transcribed sentence.
This ability is called natural language understanding, or NLU, and it is what allows expansion of UK English support to Canada without too many problems arising.
Even an assistant AI that can accurately hear and transcribe words must still go through the labor-intensive localization process of NLU — that is, Spanish may be Spanish in Spain, Mexico, and the United States, but each dialect also requires a distinct linguistic model.
Collecting the Speech Training Data
This guide shows the many steps in localizing voice-active technology and wearables. The in-depth process involves everything from demographic research to speech data collection and annotation as well as testing the technology in multiple languages.
Every step in this process is crucial to getting high-quality data and ensuring the voice assistant will work well on new markets.
Globalme's own research shows that while certain attributes like vocal gender vary mostly by user, they also show demographic differences between markets. A male voice may play better in areas that desire a more authoritative sound, for example.
NLU is where the intent behind an utterance is truly found, however; speech data needs to be specific to local usages of words, grammar, and colloquial expressions. Accurate transcription and annotation are essential in all to building a well working product.
An Outlook on the Future
The voice assistant market will continue to grow, reaching as much as seven times its current value by 2025 — and that means that even mega-corporations can't assume they'll be the only ones working to control the market.
New challengers certainly have an uphill battle to catch up to the existing capabilities of voice assistants like Home, Siri, and Alexa, but tech startups have shocked the world with incredible advancements several times before.
Alibaba is already making moves in the Chinese market, for instance, while in the West the Open Source AI Voice Assistant project has real potential to destabilize service providers that get too complacent.
Lenovoseems to have chosen Alexa to power its low-cost assistant products — but there's no telling who will win the larger war for consumer voice control.
In the end, early dominance in this emerging market will likely be the key to long-term success, and that early momentum will arise mostly from a reputation for easy, naturalistic interaction.
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About Globalme
Globalme provides data services, localization services, and managed services for emerging technologies like voice assistants, smart home technology, and chat bots.
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