Artificial intelligence and voice command functionality are at the centre of the smart speaker war being waged between Amazon, Apple and Google, as The National reported yesterday. Speech recognition features in each of these devices are capable of understanding an array of accents, dialects and speech patterns, even if some users complain of the limited overall abilities of today’s digital assistants. In September last year, Google turned on its machine-learning system to analyse languages and sentence structures, allowing Google Translate to create its own artificial language, called interlingua, to improve its output. Every day the technology inches closer to more comprehensive accuracy.
So, next time Alexa or Assistant fluffs its lines when you ask it what the weather is going to be like tomorrow, don’t be too hard on your digital friend. After all, how often do our words get lost in translation in every day life?