Introduction of Voice Assistants

Introduction

A "Voice Assistant" is a computer program that can converse with a human and carry out tasks by following instructions or receiving information through voice commands (Oxford Learners Dictionary). With the emergence of AI in the last two decades, this type of program has advanced significantly, thanks to technological breakthroughs like Hidden Markov Models, and Neural Networks that have improved their speech recognition capabilities, as well as improvements in audio signal quality. Today, Voice Assistants are an integral part of our daily lives, present in nearly every personal and home device.

Historical Context

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Key Innovations

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Impact

Impact on the field

Voice Assistants are in most of our daily used devices, such as a smartphone, laptop and speakers. Users can ask the same question in different ways, for example: “What is my name?”, “Do you know what my name is?”, “What would my name be?”. All these questions trigger the expected response. This is because these Voice Assistants use Natural Language processing and speech recognition technologies. This has been improved over the years, which has been discussed in the historical context.

The first consumer-oriented voice recognition system was Dragon Dictate. This program had some recognition difficulties but later on these were overcome, which is where the first Voice Assistants were created. The first Voice Assistant as we know them today was Apple’s Siri. First, this was an app, but later built into iOS software in 2011. Later on, different companies also started to create their own Voice Assistant. Each assistant is unique, but the core functions are the same, which means that the technology behind speech recognition is similar to all the different assistants. Matthew B. Hoy (2018) There is this ‘competition’ that when one thing is created, other companies will create or improve an even better version than the original. So when the Voice Assistants made their debut, other tech companies created or improved their own Voice Assistant to take the lead in this new field of interacting with a computer. The past few years since Voice Assistants are in our smartphones, more devices have built in speech recognition, for example in cars.

Security and privacy

There also have been some issues regarding the security and privacy of Voice Assistance. Users can ask to read out loud their personal information, emails, calendar contents, etc. To prevent other people from asking about personal details, Google upgraded its Voice Assistant software to include voice printing, which identifies each user by voice. There have been some cases where anyone from outside could unlock someone’s house by asking Siri to unlock the door. Matthew B. Hoy (2018) The voice prints can also be used to recognize an individual’s unique voice in cases of fraud or theft. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11783663.pdf Amazon’s Alexa had a voice passcode that was introduced to confirm purchases.

Voice Assistants are also vulnerable to attacks, like commands that are delivered at ultrasonic frequencies. For example, a product advertisement on television that has embedded ultrasound commands can add items to your shopping list.

Also, do these devices always listen? They have to respond by specific cues, so in fact they always need to listen. According to Amazon, Apple and all other tech companies, they insist that all of their devices are not recording the users, only when the user speaks the command to activate the Voice Assistant. Even if the companies are being really careful creating these Assistance, there is a chance of sending the recordings to the company’s server.

Application in various industries

As I already mentioned, Voice Assistants are used in our daily life. Here there are different categories, such as music, hands free search and other uses of Voice Assistants. This categorie is mostly used to ask for jokes https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3311956. It is also used to help people who have a disability to read and help people to understand the prescriptions. Also, for people who are blind and there is not a braille text available. Also, there has been research about people with dementia who can benefit from a voice assistant that can answer the same questions over and over again without losing patience and encourage the patients when needed. (HOY) During the Covid-19 pandemic, hospitals were struggling with maintaining inpatient and outpatient services for other healthcare needs. Voice Assistants have been used to deliver healthcare information, which reduced stress on the health system. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-020-00332-0

Future Research

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Group members

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