Amazon’s Alexa personal assistant may soon have the ability to distinguish between different users’ voices.
A report from TIME brings word from ‘people familiar with the matter,’ who say the company is working on advanced voice recognition tools.
This would enable the Echo speaker and other Alexa-powered devices to know who in the household is making the request.
Such tech would be crucial in terms of personalising the Alexa experience.
When users ask ‘How’s my commute?’ or to ‘play my Flash Briefing,’ each member of the household could receive a response based on their own profile.
Currently, users have to ask Alexa to switch accounts in order to access their own profiles.
Related: Best Alexa Skills
Amazon could achieve this by taking a ‘voice print’ according to the sources.
Internally, the feature is called Voice ID, according to the report, and has been in development since 2015.
Should Amazon roll out the feature, Alexa will be the first of the major AI assistants to offer such advanced voice recognition technology.
It could give the company even more of an upper hand in the fight against Google Home and mobile-based assistants like Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri.
What would you like Amazon to add to Alexa’s arsenal next? Share your thoughts below.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
