Alexa's new Whisper mode goes online – TechCrunch



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At Amazon's Alexa event last month in Seattle, the company announced a new upcoming feature in its voice assistant: the ability to whisper. The company demonstrated how whispering a request – such as "playing a lullaby" – to Alexa would prompt the voice assistant to respond in the same way. Today, Amazon declares that Whisper Mode is officially launched.

The feature is being deployed for users in the US, tells us the company, and works in English.

This is especially useful for bedtime or nighttime scenarios where you try to keep the room quiet. And, of course, this is especially helpful for parents who do not want to wake up Alexa and try to wake up a sleeping child, or who are trying to set a "bedtime", "nap time" or a moment longer. calm in general. tone to their interactions.

Whisper Mode is one of the many features that Amazon has worked on to make Alexa more context sensitive.
For example, the wizard knows that a command to "play Hunger Games" probably means that the movie is started, if it is prompted to do so on a device with a screen, while the same command addressed to an Echo speaker would launch the audiobook instead.

At the Amazon event in September, the company also introduced a new Echo smart home feature called "Alexa Guard". This sound detection technology will allow Alexa to recognize smoke detectors, carbon monoxide alarms and broken glass.

Alexa Guard and Whisper Mode both use a machine learning network called "long-term memory," explained Alexa's senior scientist, Rohit Prasad.

Incoming audio signals are broken down into ultra-short extracts, and the long-term and short-term memory network processes them in order, the company said in September. The system also takes into account his judgments on previous snippets when he tries to determine if a new snippet is a whisper or an alarm. In this way, he can learn systematic relationships between segments of a audio signal separated in time, explains Amazon.

The company also showed last month how much of Alexa's voice interactions became more natural with a "carry-over", which means you can ask additional questions, such as "how about tomorrow?" have first asked "Will it rain today?", for example.

And recently, she patented a technology that would allow Alexa to tell if you're sick, then sell you drugs – like cough drops. The system could also detect emotions, such as joy, anger or grief, according to reports.

To check if the Whisper mode has reached your Alexa device, you just have to try it. These are not parameters that you can enable or disable manually.

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