The Future Of Data Visualization & Processing is Here in 2017- Amazon Alexa!
The first thing that you might relate with Amazon will not be consumer electronic goods but their eCommerce website that still holds the no.1 position in terms of customer satisfaction in the world. But, recently Amazon Alexa is everywhere and the buzz about the device is never ending. Many big companies like LG, GE, Ford, Volkswagen & Huawei are integrating their devices with Amazon Alexa. These companies have developed their devices with a microphone & a speaker by enabling you to interact with the Alexa built in these devices and there is no Echo required to do this.
How strange would it be if your LG refrigerator is able to talk to you and obey your orders?
“Hey refrigerator! Open up & give me an apple”
Alexa- “There you go, here is your apple”.
Or
“Hey refrigerator! We are running short of eggs. Can you place an order for 6 crates of eggs?”
Alexa- “Order placed on Amazon.com & the estimated delivery is tomorrow”.
While Ford & Volkswagen have already announced that their cars will be built with Amazon Alexa & GE has also made an announcement that they have come up with a fancy Alexa- enabled LED lamp. Can you imagine that you will be able to interact with your products to look up for directions, music playlists or even predict the weather.
This might all sound funny & silly. But, consumers are not really looking for a radio like device that only conveys things through voices & which does not have a display.
But, Amazon is actually very ambitious in creating a “Third Major Computing Platform” that will mark it’s own position alongside the Personal Computers & the Smart Phones.
Microsoft dominated the Personal Computer era when computing was just restricted to Mouse & Keyboard. Now, Apple & Google are currently fighting to dominate the smartphones era. So, Amazon is in the journey of building the third biggest computing platform: One for devices that have no screens at all.
But, Amazon dominating this market is not that easy & they know Google is behind them. Google is catching up rapidly with Amazon Echo with their speaker like device- Google Home & their Alexa like interface is called Google Assistant. Creator of Siri & Cortana are not going to give away this market to Amazon without a tough fight.
“Hey, Alexa!”
Each time millions of Alexa users across the world says “Hey, Alexa!” before ordering their groceries, turn on lights or play music are going to give Amazon a truly rare stock of data that it could utilize to shun competitors and dominate the voice-operated assistants market by making the platform “Do The Undoable”.
Amazon clearly stated in a recent conference at Santa Clara that- “We are getting an insane amount of data coming in and we are working on it”.
The long standing challenge of the speech recognition industry has been the “Cocktail Party Problem”. The challenge is to segregate just a single voice from a group of many people talking. All these data can be only understood by Alexa if the data is fed to its programming code in one single voice.
How Does Alexa Work?
Amazon Alexa easily identifies that somebody is trying to call it when it hears “Hey! Alexa”. But like all the other voice recognition platforms, it struggles to identify the words that are the actual requests from the user. In order to avoid this confusion, Amazon Alexa team developed an interface where the voice that calls out “Alexa” is characterized every aspect of that particular voice to understand the usage of words in a much better manner. The data Amazon is amassing to take on problems like that could be unique. Standard datasets available for training and testing speech recognition systems don’t usually include audio captured in home environments, or using microphone arrays like that the Echo uses to focus on speech from a particular direction.
How Is It Advantage Amazon Over Google?
The real game changer is Data here. The data piling up from Alexa could also help Amazon fend off Google’s Echo competitor, Google Home, which launched late last year. Google can draw on years of work in Web search and voice search, and sizeable investments in artificial intelligence. But its previous products and businesses don’t naturally collect speech like that of a person calling out to a device in the home, or on the same type of requests people ask home assistants to serve.
Amazon is probably hoping that this contest turns out like the Web search market. Research has suggested that one reason Google’s dominance couldn’t be shaken by startups or well-funded competitors such as Microsoft was that Google had piles more data on what people search for and click on.
Early reviews of Google Home have generally said that it and Amazon’s products are broadly similar, each with their own strong points. And Google is presumably working hard to learn all it can from the data coming in from its new product. But it will take some time for that flow of information to rival what Amazon is getting.
The Future Is Here!
Conversely, as more and more companies incorporate Alexa into their gadgets, the case for creating an Alexa skill will become more compelling. Today, customers expect their banks and airlines to have smartphone apps. In a few years, they may also expect them to create Alexa skills to check their bank balance or whether their flight has been delayed. And now a good news for Indians. Alexa is not capable of speaking Hinglish, a combination of (Hindi+English).