Voice Assistants and Names Don’t Always Mix
It’s been a busy past few weeks for me, and I ran into a situation that I have seen in the past, and I wanted to share some knowledge about voice assistants. Most people just don't understand the complexities and limitations of the technology with voice assistants, so I thought that sharing this particular use case, and the difficulties of it, might be helpful for some people.
My Voice Assistant Situation
One of my customers had a desire to have a voice assistant understand and respond to questions about people, and have the ability to recognize the names of the people being asked about. This would require a customized Speech-to-Text (STT) model that could listen to user utterances, and translate those into the names of people. In this scenario, my customer wanted to be able to handle a wide variety of different names and surnames. They also wanted to be able to handle a variety of different English accents.
This particular customer has been listening to a variety of industry “experts” and sales professionals about how AI is going to answer all of their questions, and solve all of their problems… if only they would give it a chance. The people in charge of the business look at the things that home assistants and other commercial applications can do, and they feel like this kind of thing should be…
