One algorithm to rule them all
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“One algorithm to rule them all, one algorithm to find them, one algorithm to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” (with apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien)1
I
recently bought an Amazon Echo.2 For those of you who don’t know, Echo is a hands-free speaker you control with your voice, whose capabilities are managed through mobile apps. Echo connects to the Alexa Voice Service, which responds to voice commands, such as “Alexa, play music by Ian Tyson.” Alexa will then announce that a sampling of music by Ian Tyson will be played, and the music begins. One can manage an almost continuous ad hoc playlist in this fashion, limited only by your memory and whether the music is available. I can request the local weather forecast, or the forecast for distant cities, such as Paris and Buenos Aires. Alexa can order pizza delivery for you. With the right hardware, Alexa can even control your lights, air conditioning, door locks, or any number of other household appliances. The Echo can also answer a range of questions on a variety of topics; its other capabilities are too numerous to list in this short article. I note that Google has a similar system that is based on Google Assistant.3 It can answer questions, play music, including from playlists that you’ve developed, control your smart home, and cast videos to your television. Other voice-activated personal assistants are Apple’s Siri4 and Microsoft Cortana.5 My experiences with Siri have been mixed. I have no experience with Cortana. Apple recently released the HomePod, a speaker with voice control and Siri intelligence. There was an incident featured on television some time ago in which a child was able to use the Echo to order a dollhouse without her parent’s permission.6 This problem has apparently been fixed. There are some who worry that personal assistants, such as Alexa, are part of a government or big business (or both) conspiracy to know everything about us. This is based upon their understanding that Alexa keeps a record of everything that is said as part of the interaction. Such a record was subpoenaed by prosecutors in Arkansas as part of a criminal case involving a murder that occurred in the vicinity (dare I say presence) of an Echo.7 Amazon recently complied with the subpoena after the defendant approved the release. I occasionally experience false responses from the Echo, even when I have not asked for anything. I often watch the game
show Jeopardy, whose host is Alex Trebek. Sometimes, when a contestant or the announcer says Alex’s name, the Echo will respond. Sometimes, it will just say that it didn’t understand the question. At other times, it will respond with statements that are meant to be a real response to the statement that has been made, but without a clear connection with anything that makes sense. In rarer cases, I will sometimes hear a response from Alexa to something triggered by random television shows. Apparently, there are still issues with the speech recognition algorithms used for the Echo. Wikipedia8 defines speech recognition as “The
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