Last month Amazon announced that it’s Alexa voice assistant would soon gain the ability to Whisper. Basically, how this works is that you can now whisper at your alexa powered device, the assistant will recognize that you are trying to ensure quite, and it will respond back in kind – by whispering back at you.
Here is Amazon’s explanation of the Whisper feature, which was released last month on its blog:
If you’re in a room where a child has just fallen asleep, and someone else walks in, you might start speaking in a whisper, to indicate that you’re trying to keep the room quiet. The other person will probably start whispering, too.
We would like Alexa to react to conversational cues in just such a natural, intuitive way, and toward that end, Amazon last week announced Alexa’s new whisper mode, which will let Alexa-enabled devices respond to whispered speech by whispering back.
The Whisper feature forms part of a suite of services that Amazon is developing to makes its Alexa voice assistant more context aware. After all, Amazon’s ultimate goal is to ensure that Alexa is as human as possible and this feature is a major step in the right direction.
Another new feature that could soon make its way to Alexa is Guard. Under this, the smart assistant will recognize sounds such as smoke alarm, carbon monoxide alarms, and the sounds of glass breaking, This is of course just the start, and the array of noises that could be added to this category is pretty vast. Think about it – Single mothers could ask Alexa to listen for the sound of their child waking up and crying when they are bus with somewhere.
Amazon also said that Alex was becoming smarter, thanks to context carryover, So basically, you could fire a string of related questions at the voice assistant and it will put the different pieces together and give you answers. Of course, this service is still developing but I will go and whisper a few related questions at my Echo, just in case.
