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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alexa, Can You Hear Me? Making AI Voice Assistants Better for Everyone. 22:45 Share

WSJ’s The Future of Everything

Shownotes Transcript

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