Amazon Echo Show: TV 3.0?
If the Amazon Echo is radio 2.0, then is the Echo Show, with Zoom and Netflix, TV 3.0?
Are you over-polishing your chatbot?
When designing a chat bot or voice bot, be careful not to over-polish your dialogue. Keep it natural and free flowing. Here’s how.
Alexa, the Amazon Services Trojan Horse?
Is the Amazon Echo and Alexa a trojan horse to allow Amazon to sell more products? Nope, but it might be to sell more services.
Your bot’s not an expert, it’s a toddler, and that’s OK
Standford University found that chatbots and voicebots that are positioned as toddlers fair better than those positioned as experts.
The difference between chatbot and voice search refinements
What’s the difference between how people use chatbots and search bars vs voice user interfaces and what does that mean for how you design interactions for each? One of the big differences between designing for a voice user interface versus a chat user interface and one of the big kind of striking differences between how […]
Amazon’s Alexa strategy latest: trying to conquer a long-standing weakness
With the latest developments in Alexa functionality announced at Alexa Live 2020, Amazon has shown a glimpse into its advancing Alexa strategy, and how it’s trying to make up for a long-standing weakness. Here’s the what, why and how.
Hacking speech systems
Why speech recognition systems struggle with accents, how you can hack your training data, and the importance of solving ASR at a platform level.
Why Alexa doesn’t understand your accent
In a study by Uswitch, it was found that Irish, Welsh and Scottish accents are the hardest for voice assistants like Alexa to understand. Here’s why Alexa doesn’t understand your accent.
Voice will catch-on sooner than you think
People often say that it’s going to be quite a while before voice catches on. But user behaviour is changing irrevocably as we speak.
Give your smart speaker a break, it’s working pretty hard
The microphone technology in your smart speaker, it’s pretty impressive. When you talk, sound leaves your mouth, but it doesn’t travel in a straight line. It travels like a shotgun and it just blasts in all different directions and then bounces around the room and you get reflections. It’s called reverb, and those reflections are […]