Why Google, Microsoft and Amazon Love the Sound of Your Voice

Speech recognition must get much better if we are to speak naturally to our gadgets. So the tech industry is vacuuming up all the conversations it can.

Jing Cao

and

Dina Bass

December 13, 2016, 6:00 AM EST

1481569785_surv-px — Illustration: Michael DeForge

Amazon's Echo has made tangible the promise of an artificially intelligent personal assistant in every home. Those who own the voice-activated gadget (known colloquially as Alexa, after its female interlocutor) are prone to proselytizing "her" charms, applauding Alexa's ability to call an Uber, order pizza or check a 10th-grader's math homework. The company says more than 5,000 people a day profess their love for Alexa.

On the other hand, Alexa devotees also know that unless you speak to her very clearly . . . and . . . slowly, she's likely to say: Sorry, I don't have the answer to that question. "I love her. I hate her, I love her," one customer wrote on Amazon's website, while still awarding Alexa five stars. "You will very quickly learn how to talk to her in a way that she will understand and it's not unlike speaking to a small frustrating toddler."