cover of episode Alexa, Can You Hear Me? Making AI Voice Assistants Better for Everyone.

Alexa, Can You Hear Me? Making AI Voice Assistants Better for Everyone.

2024/1/12
logo of podcast WSJ’s The Future of Everything

WSJ’s The Future of Everything
AI Chapters Transcript
Chapters
AI voice assistants have become commonplace, but their accessibility for people with atypical voices is limited. Error rates for those with neurological conditions can be significantly higher than for typical speakers. The podcast explores how technology companies and researchers aim to improve this.
  • AI voice assistants are not equally accessible to everyone, especially those with atypical voices.
  • Error rates for people with neurological conditions can be as high as 90%.
  • Tech companies are working to improve accessibility but it remains a challenge.

Shownotes Transcript

AI voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa have become part of our everyday lives. But for people with atypical voices, including those with conditions like Parkinson’s disease and muscular dystrophy, these tools can be frustrating to use. Now a number of big tech companies including Amazon and Google, as well as research organizations are coming up with ways to make them more useful. What will it take to create voice assistants that work for everyone right out of the box? 

What do you think about the show? Let us know on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or email us: FOEPodcast@wsj.com 

Further reading:

Tech Firms Train Voice Assistants to Understand Atypical Speech 

Amazon Makes Alexa Chattier and More Capable Using Generative AI  

Alexa, Siri, Cortana: Why All Your Bots Are Female   

Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition (2014, arXiv)  

Librispeech: An ASR corpus based on public domain audio books (2015, IEEE International Conference)  

Speech Accessibility Project from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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