Day 51 – Q 4.How do voice assistants function? What are their day to day applications? Examine.

4. How do voice assistants function? What are their day to day applications? Examine. . 

वॉयस असिस्टेंट कैसे कार्य करते हैं? उनके दिन–प्रतिदिन के अनुप्रयोग क्या हैं? जांच करें।

Introduction:

A voice assistant is a digital assistant that uses voice recognition, natural language processing and speech synthesis to provide aid to users through phones and voice recognition applications.

Voice assistants are used in phone lines, smartphones and other places to assist users with tasks, including listening to an audiobook, requesting information, inputting a search query, making reservations, adding items to a shopping list, performing mathematical calculations, playing music. 

Body

How do voice assistants function? 

• In general voice assistants react to voice commands and give the user relevant information about his inquiry. 
• For the voice-enabled world, smartspeakers have shown to hold a lot of potential. These have a microphone to “hear” and speakers to communicate back to us or play music. 
• The smart part is their direct connection to the internet and advanced speech recognition software. The software can understand and react to specific commands. Asking the voice assistant in the smartspeaker for tomorrow’s weather is a good example. The assistant will decipher the human voice command and then act independently by searching the web for the right answer and reading it back to the user.
• The software is the actual core of the artificial intelligence that enables the smartspeaker to answer our specific questions and human commands. Being able to understand and process our questions is the great challenge voice assistants have to master. Meaning a voice assistant has to be able to learn and make use of languages to be able to pick the right answers to our commands.
• In the combination of the physical and digital parts of the smartspeaker lies their great potential to act as a bridge in-between humans and their computers or machines.

Applications of voice assistant technology

• Health Care – It can provide personalized medicine and X-ray readings. Personal health care assistants can act as life coaches, reminding you to take your pills, exercise or eat healthier.
• Manufacturing: AI can analyze factory IoT data as it streams from connected equipment to forecast expected load and demand using recurrent networks, a specific type of deep learning network used with sequence data.
• Home automation – It can interact with smart home appliances and run the show. Eg – Marvel comic based Iron man’s virtual assistant Jarvis.
• Food ordering – Voice assistant can be used to order food just by voice command. Eg – Many companies have collaborated with Alexa and their website support Alexa like Domino’s, Pizza hut, Starbucks etc.
• Entertainment – Voice assistant can recognize the command and play music. Ex: Alexa, Siri can play music from streaming services such as Apple Music and Google Play Music from a phone or tablet. Also allows the user to hear updates on supported sports teams.
• Messaging and Email – Voice assistant can help in sending text messages and Email without any need for physical interference. Ex: Messages can be sent from one Alexa application to another as well as Echo devices.
• Weather – It can help in controlling indoor temperature depending on the command given. It can also provide weather reports.
• Operating appliances: It can help in operating appliances at home like making coffee, switching on/off lights and also probably park cars, among others. 

Conclusion

It’s pretty safe to assume voice assistants will achieve more popularity in the next years. While the technology still has a long way to go to deliver super smart assistants, it’s clear it’s no longer the joke it used to be when it was launched. Moreover, with the rise of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT), they’ll become even more advanced and better at helping their users handle their daily tasks.