Amazon is working on unique voice recognition for Alexa
One of the early problems people lamented for home AI assistants is the fact that multiple people may live in a house, and multiple people may want to use that one home hub. How does a machine quickly adjust for each individual’s needs?
For Amazon, they thankfully included a method to have Alexa switch between user profiles. It works, but it seems they want to take all of the “mechanics,” so to speak, out of the ordeal. As such, they’re said to be working on a way for Alexa to automatically recognize individual voices and change profiles based on who’s speaking.
Unique voice recognition isn’t a new concept, of course, but we’re sure the implementation of it can’t be easy, at least not for practical purposes. There are just too many nuances in the human voice that makes it a very tricky problem to solve. Yours truly can sport different tonality based on how tired he is (we all know about morning voice).
For Amazon, though, they’ve supposedly been working on the technology since 2015 and Time reports they have it ready to roll, the only hold up being other factors such as security and privacy concerns. This makes it sound like we’re not far off from seeing them introduce it — perhaps for a brand new generation of Echoes set to launch later this year? Fingers crossed!