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Siri also learns by dictation. He doesn't speak Czech yet, but he is otherwise the most linguistically equipped of the voice assistants

Ondrej Holzman
13

2017 is the year when it took off in full the battle of the smart voice assistants, which have the potential to become our essential helpers. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google have their irons in the fire, with each one different. In one of the most important elements, however, Apple's Siri holds the lead – it can speak the most languages.

The Czech user probably won't be too interested in this, because unfortunately Siri still doesn't speak the most important language for him, but otherwise the apple assistant speaks and understands 21 languages ​​localized for 36 countries, which none of the competitors can match.

Microsoft's Cortana is taught to speak eight languages ​​in thirteen countries, Google Assistant can speak four languages, and Amazon's Alexa can only speak English and German so far. At a time when the majority of smartphones are sold outside of the United States, localizing their voice assistants is extremely important for all tech companies. And Apple has a head start here, also thanks to the fact that it was the first to come up with Siri.

All debates about whether now go aside Apple did not waste this lead one bit and the competition is catching up or even beginning to overtake him in terms of assistant skills. Agency Reuters in fact, she came up with interesting information about how Siri actually learns new languages, which in the end may be a bit more important than some functions for many markets.

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If voice assistants are really to spread as much as possible and become a smart helper not only in smartphones around the world, knowing as many languages ​​as possible is absolutely key. This is also why Siri is learning the special dialect of the Chinese Wu language family, which is only spoken in the vicinity of Shanghai, the so-called "Shanghai language".

When Siri is about to start learning a new language, people enter Apple's labs to read passages in different accents and dialects. These are then manually transcribed so that the computer knows exactly what the text is. The head of Apple's speech team, Alex Acero, explains that the range of sounds in different voices is also captured, from which an acoustic model is created, which then tries to predict word sequences.

After this process, the dictation mode will come up, which can be commonly used by both iOS and macOS users and works in many more languages ​​than Siri. Apple then always captures a small percentage of these audio recordings, anonymizes them and then transcribes them back into text so that the computer can learn. This conversion is also done by humans, which reduces the probability of a transcription error by half.

Once enough data has been collected and Siri has been spoken to the new language, Apple will release an assistant with answers to the most likely questions. Siri then learns in the real world based on what users ask her, and is continuously improved every two weeks. It is certainly not in the power of Apple or anyone else to write in advance all possible scenarios that users will use.

“You can't hire enough writers to build the system you need for every language. You have to synthesize the answers,” explained pro Reuters Charles Jolley, who created the intelligent assistant Ozlo. Dag Kittlaus, boss and co-founder of another smart assistant, Viv, which last year also agrees bought by Samsung.

“Viv was built precisely to solve the scaling problem of smart assistants. The only way you can get around today's limited functionality is to open up the system and let the world teach it," says Kittlaus.

The Czech Siri has been talked about for a long time, but it is probably impossible to expect that the apple assistant would learn our native language in the near future. Considering the number of native speakers, Czech is still relatively small and uninteresting, even the aforementioned "Shanghai" is spoken by roughly 14 million people.

But what's interesting about the process of learning new languages ​​is that Apple uses dictation data to do it. That means the more we will dictate Czech into iPhones, iPads or Macs, on the one hand, the more the function will improve, and on the other hand, Apple will have an increasingly large sample of data, from which Siri will one day be able to learn Czech. The question is how much longer it will last.

Source: Reuters
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