After the release of Google Assistant last week, the competition in voice-assistant tech is in full swing but as always, Apple have stayed ahead of the game by introducing new languages for Siri. A recent report offered a behind-the-scenes look at how developers teach Siri to learn new languages, one of the things that is keeping Apple ahead of the game.
Apple starts this process by having people read passages in a number of accents and dialects. These speeches are then manually transcribed for the computers and after supplementing them with a range of sounds in different voices, Apple builds an acoustic language model that predicts the word sequence.
After that, Apple deploys ‘dictation mode’, a text-to-speech translator in the new language. When users use this mode, developers capture a small percentage of this information, make them anonymous and completes them with background noise and mumbled words, a process that helps to cut speech recognition error. After enough data is gathered, a voice actor is hired to play Siri in the new language and is released with answers to the questions that Apple believes will be the most commonly asked. “What is the weather like today?”, for example. Once released, Siri tends to update every two weeks or so to adapt to what real-world users ask.
By contrast with other voice-assistants, Siri can speak 21 languages localized for 36 countries. Microsoft’s Cortana currently only has 8 languages under her belt and Google Assistant, which features on Android devices, speaks a meager four languages and Amazon’s Alexa is bottom of the league with only English and German language options available. Poor show, Alexa. Siri’s next language will be the very niche Shanghainese, a special dialect of Wu Chinese spoken only around Shanghai, but Reuters have hinted that the company’s approach could be problematic because of the sheer scale of it which will soon start to demand more writers.
Despite it’s impressive language capabilities, Siri is no stranger to being in the line of fire when it comes to lagging behind it’s rivals in terms of other things. Amazon’s Alexa regularly gains new skills and Google Assistant can understand things such as context which in turn enables a more conversational response. Apple have been rumored to be updating Siri in the new iPhone release and while what those could be may still be unclear, we do know that Apple has been investing a lot of money and time in to AI.
