How To Correct Alexa Pronunciation?
Method #1: Change the Spelling of Your Name – Changing the spelling of your name is the first and the simplest way to get Alexa to pronounce your name correctly. For this, you’ll need to go to the “Communicate” settings and type in the phonetic spelling of your name. Below are a couple of steps that will help you out in doing so. ( 1 )
Open the Alexa app on your smartphoneSelect “Communicate”, which can be found at the bottom of the screenNow head over to your profile; your profile icon will look like a little person
Click on your nameUnder your name, go to the “My Communication Settings”
Click on “Edit”
Change your name and enter the phonetic spelling
Can you train Alexa to say things?
Step 3a (optional): Create your own response – If none of the pre-made responses suit your needs or if you just want to get creative or prank your family and friends, you may want to customize your own response. To do this, simply tap the Customized option on the Alexa Says screen and type in what you’d like Alexa to say in response. This is where you can get really creative Michael Gariffo
Can Alexa learn on its own?
How we taught Alexa to correct her own defects Most of the major advances in artificial intelligence in the past decade, in both industry and academia, have been the result of supervised deep learning, in which neural networks learn to perform tasks by analyzing thousands or even millions of training examples labeled by human annotators.
- At Amazon, we’ve been exploring a range of ways to reduce human involvement in machine learning, such as,
- Another promising approach, from my Alexa AI team, is something we call self-learning.
- An Alexa customer who’s unsatisfied with the response to a request may interrupt the response and rephrase the request.
With our self-learning system, Alexa uses this type of implicit signal to deduce — without any human involvement — how to respond correctly to the initial request. We deployed this system more than a year ago, and it’s currently correcting millions of misheard or misspoken requests every week.
For instance, Alexa has learned to overwrite the request “play Sirius XM Chill” with “play Sirius Channel 53”. Next month, at the of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in New York, we’ll present a that explains how the system works. Our fundamental insight: model sequences of rephrased requests as absorbing Markov chains,
A Markov chain models a dynamic system as a sequence of states, each of which has a certain probability of transitioning to any of several other states. (Often, Markov chains aren’t really chains; the sequences of states can branch out to form more complex networks of transitions.) The game Chutes and Ladders (a.k.a.
- Snakes and Ladders), for instance, can be modeled using a Markov chain.
- From any position on the board, there is a set of fixed probabilities (determined by die rolls) of moving to a finite number of other positions.
- An absorbing Markov chain has two distinctive properties: (1) it has a final state, with zero probability of transitioning to any other, and (2) the final state is accessible from any other system state.
The Markov chain describing Chutes and Ladders is in fact an absorbing Markov chain. We model sequences of rephrased requests as absorbing Markov chains. There are two absorbing states, success and failure, and our system identifies them from a variety of clues.
For instance, if the customer says “Alexa, stop” and issues no further requests, or if Alexa returns a generic failure response, such as, “Sorry, I don’t know that one”, the absorbing state is a failure. If, on the other hand, the final request is to play a song, which is then allowed to play for a substantial amount of time, the absorbing state is a success.
To standardize our representations of system states, we used the output of Alexa’s natural-language-understanding models, which describe utterances according to
domains, such as music;intents, such as playing music; andslots, such as the names of particular albums or songs.
So the customer utterances “Play ‘Despicable Me'” and “Put on ‘Despicable Me'” produce the same system state, which is specified completely by assigning the value “Despicable Me” to the slot SongName. Absorbing Markov chains describing three different series of customer interactions with Alexa ( a – c ).
- Different customer utterances ( u 0, u 1, u 2 ) can correspond to the same state of the system ( h 0 ).
- The absorbing states are represented by a checkmark (success) or an X (failure).
- To test our approach, we first constructed separate absorbing Markov chains for millions of customer interactions with Alexa over a three-month period.
Because we standardized the representation of system states, many of these chains involved the same relatively small pool of states, as in the figure above. Next, we calculated the frequency with which any given state would follow any other, across all the absorbing Markov chains.
In the example at left, for instance, h 0 has a 25% chance of being followed by each of h 0, h 1, h 3, and the absorbing failure state. Once we had collected these summary statistics for a given group of interrelated system states, we produced a new Markov chain that aggregated our findings. In the aggregated chain, the transition probabilities between states are defined by the frequency with which a given state follows another in our data.
The aggregated Markov chain for the example above. H 0 has a 25% chance of being succeeded by h 0, h 1, h 3, or the failure state, but h 1 and h 3 both have 100% chances of being succeeded by h 2, From each state in the aggregate chain, we simply identify the path that leads with highest probability to the success state.
The penultimate state in the path — the one right before the success state — is the one that the system should use to overwrite the first state in the path. In the example above, for instance, the system would learn to overwrite h 0, h 1, and h 3, all of which misinterpret the customer as having said “stickable me”, with h 2 (AlbumName = “Despicable Me”).
Because this procedure is wholly automated, it may sometimes learn invalid substitutions — for instance, if customers unable to coax Alexa to play a desired song frequently bail out to the same chart-topping alternative. But based on user feedback, we also developed a blacklist of substitutions that the system should not perform.
What language does Alexa speak?
How to make Alexa bilingual – Alexa has the option to listen and respond in English and other languages, or a combination of two languages. This feature is available on 3rd Generation Echo speakers, 2nd Generation Echo Shows and the newer generations of both devices. To access your device’s language settings, go to the Amazon Alexa app. Image: Maria Diaz / ZDNet To make Alexa bilingual, you need to access the Device Settings on the Echo device that you want to change. This makes it so that each Echo device in your home can be set up to communicate in a different language. You can set an Echo Show in your kitchen, for example, to speak English, and an Echo Dot in your office to speak two languages. Image: Maria Diaz / ZDNet Find and select the Echo device that you want to change the language from the list of available devices. Image: Maria Diaz / ZDNet Within the Echo you selected, tap on the gear icon at the top right of your screen to access the settings for that specific device. Image: Maria Diaz / ZDNet Scroll down the settings until you find Language and select it. Image: Maria Diaz / ZDNet Find the language setting you want your Alexa to have. Whether you want a single language, or a bilingual setting, you’ll only have to make one choice. Alexa languages are in individual options or as a set of two languages. This means that you can choose English or choose English/Italian, but it’ll always be one choice. Image: Maria Diaz / ZDNet That’s it, Alexa should be bilingual within a few minutes of setting this up. Since the voice assistant can understand both languages, it will respond in each language, depending on which one was used to make the request.
Can you say Echo instead of Alexa?
4. Choose a new Alexa wake word – When you first unbox your Echo, the default wake word it answers to is Alexa. However, you can change the wake word at any time. Amazon’s other traditional options to call your voice assistant are Computer, Amazon and Echo, but there are also several newer wake word additions you can use like Ziggy and Hey, Disney,
- Unfortunately, you can’t give it a unique name, so you have to pick from the above options.
- If you want to change the name, just say “Alexa, change the wake word” and choose another option.
- Or if you’re not near your Echo speaker, you can open the Alexa app and navigate to Settings,
- Then, select Device Settings and choose your device (for example, Katie’s Echo Dot).
Scroll down and tap Wake Word, then select what you’d like to call your voice assistant.