In recent times, all of us must’ve heard the name “Alexa”. Alexa is an efficient voice controlled cloud based Artificial intelligent Amazon’s product that you can talk too .It may feel so exciting while we think about the interaction between this software and humans, but is it necessary and trustable to have such system and let it hear every convo of us? That’s what we're gonna see.
Alexa is a virtual assistant technology that works in response of the commands or queries from the user. It uses Automatic speech recognition(ASR) technology to convert the spoken words into text. It basically start works from the word ‘Alexa’, which is actually a wakeup word ie that word alerts the software that it should be gonna ready to focus on the voice command followed by. We can also train Alexa to better understand and recognize our voice by setupping up a voice profile. We’ve had enough on how it works, so coming to the tasks it can perform, it is capable of controlling your smart devices in home or workplace. It can perform many things you ask to. It can give you real time informations such as about weather, news etc. and can play your favorite playlist, manage calls, your todo tasks; All you need to do is just give a voice command. It can also accompany you on cooking by searching for recipes and set timers.It knows every measurements and calculations and even helps you in counting calories in your food. Most importantly it is interactive and fun, which is what most of us needs today ie. a partner to talk with. If you would like to hear a story, alexa would do that for you in whatever theme you want to. It can also guards your home- when you are far from home and once you enabled the feature in the app’s setting say “Alexa, I’m leaving” which activates the guard, then Alexa guard listens for glass breaking sound or alarm sound of smoke detectors and will send you an alert with an audio clip,which is a great tech to consider.
However there also exist some downsides for every great technology.
•Alexa sometimes has trouble recognizing the words ie. it may wrongly hear something and tries to replace it with some other which may or maynot related to the actual command which could frustrate the user.
•Children may get addicted to these kind of voice interactive technologies
•Alexa doesn't constantly record and doesn't record conversations purposely,but it surely can record conversations accidently if it misthink it hears its wakeword, which is one of the most common problems faced by alexa users.
•So if we wanna have such a wonderful technology like Alexa in day-to-day life which makes our life much easier than before, we should also be tolerable enough to accept its bugs.
-BY KAVIYA J Nov 11,2021