Tech giants seek to make interactions smoother by eliminating keyword triggering

With the voice assistants of the future, no more “Hey Siri”, “OK Google” and other “Alexa”. We might no longer need a keyword to activate them and send them our requests.

The idea is to be able to order them directly, without having to start all your sentences with the famous keyword, and thus have smoother and more natural interactions with your personal assistant. All the tech giants are working on it. Apple is the first to publish encouraging research results. He relied on artificial intelligence to do a bit like us: analyze the tone and context of the request to understand who it is addressed to.

Active listening will determine if there are people around or if the person is alone, it will also check if you are close or far from the device, if the phone is in your pocket or not, etc. In more than 80% of cases, artificial intelligence would be able to distinguish requests addressed to the personal assistant. This means, conversely, some misunderstandings in perspective on the remaining 20%…

What is constant listening?

The system therefore requires listening 24 hours a day to everything that is said around you. We must accept this idea. Many people have wondered if their computer or phone is spying on them. Many have noticed that when we talk about a trip to Thailand, a few hours later, we see, as if by chance, an advert for a trip to Thailand… But the networks would be completely saturated if all the phones, all computers sent everything they heard to the internet for analysis. Even if we wanted to do it, it would be impossible.

However, it is true that connected speakers and phone assistants are constantly listening. But they only record hearing the famous key word once. And it is from that moment that they send what is said to the Google, Amazon or Apple servers.

Local operation

The new keyword-free system should work entirely locally. It is intended that no information travels over the internet and that everything remains on the device. There will therefore be less risk of our conversations being listened to by a third party. We will see if this will be enough to reassure, or if it will only reinforce urban legends.