Alexa's Whisper Fashion is now available in the U.S.

Amazon debuted a bunch of new and refreshed devices (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/index.php?navig=en), but it's a new feature – Whisper Mode – is hitting Alexa devices this week. The company said that starting today, speakers and smart home appliances powered by Alexa, its virtual assistant, will respond to whispered speech by whispering back.

It works in U.S. English, but it is not enabled by default. To answer this question> Alexa Account> Alexa Voice Responses> Whispered Responses in the Alexa companion app, or say, "Alexa, turn on whisper mode."

Amazon Whisper Mode is completely autonomous. In a blog post published earlier this month, Zeynab Raeesy, a speech scientist in the Amazon's Alexa Speech Group, revealed its artificial intelligence (AI) underpinnings.

In essence, Whisper Mode uses a neural network – layers of mathematical functions loosely modeled after the human brain 's neurons – to distinguish between normal and whispered words. That's more challenging than it sounds; Speech whispering is predominantly unvoiced – that is to say, it does not involve the vibration of the vocal cords – and tends to have more energy in lower frequency bands than ordinary speech.

"If you're in a room where a child has just fallen asleep, and someone else walks in, you might want to speak to a whisper, to indicate that you're trying to keep the room quiet. The other person will probably start whispering, too, "Raeesy wrote. "We would like to react to such conversations in just such a natural, intuitive way."

Whisper Mode is not Amazon's first foray into AI-assisted voice analysis. In a briefing with reporters late last year, Alexa Chief Scientist Rohit Prasad said Amazon's Alexa team was beginning to compare the sounds of users' voices to recognize moods and emotional states.

"It's early days for this, because it's detecting frustration and emotion on far-field audio is hard, I'm frustrated. Am I frustrated right now? You can not tell unless you know me, "Prasad told VentureBeat. "With language, you can already express 'Hey, Alexa play upbeat music' or 'Play dance music.' Those we are able to get you from a position of identification, but where do you want to be? acoustic expressions of your mood. "

And it's start of the year: Hunches. With Hunches, Alexa can provide information based on what they know about a local network. For example, if you say "Alexa, good night," in response, Alexa might say "By the way, your living room light is on. Do you want me to turn it off? "