Amazon’s Alexa is ranked among the best voice assistants in the world that help carry out various tasks at home/work, just with the power of your voice alone. From changing random channels on the television to setting alarms and switching to different websites, Alexa is able to respond to a wide range of voice commands on the go. It has not only added much more convenience and flexibility to our lives, but also helped us save time.
But, have you ever wondered “how does the high-end tech behind Alexa work?”
Well, let’s find out. According to a survey conducted by the Program Manager at Microsoft, Adi Agashe, Alexa uses natural language processing (NLP) to convert our commands into words, ideas, and sounds.
For example, Amazon Alexa uses a high-end mechanism to record the user’s words and interpret them. It breaks down the commands into individual sounds and consults its database to identify the meaning of various words – this helps Alexa make sense of the given commands. For instance, if Alexa recognizes words like ‘football’ or ‘baseball’, it might just open the sports app(s) for you.
Besides this, Amazon also features a ‘speak back’ server which allows Alexa to send back information to your device. Just in case, Alexa wants to say something back, it follows the same procedure all over again, but in a reverse order.
In-Depth Explanation
Amazon Alexa relies on signal processing which enables the device to interpret audio commands. Basically, the whole idea is to improve the target signals so that Alexa is easily able to identify ambient voices like the television or radio and clear up the signals for its use. As Amazon features an extremely robust in-built tech, it uses seven microphones to determine the direction of the signals. It helps the device enable Acoustic echo cancellation so that any unwanted signals are omitted.
Another important task for Alexa is the “Wake Word Detection” – it helps the device become active and respond to the user’s command immediately. Even if the user says, ‘Alexa’, the device will become all ears to them – thanks to its auto-programmed servers. Besides this, the Wake Word Detection also helps to minimize any sort of mishaps and to identify pronunciation differences accurately.
For example, once the wake word is recognized by Alexa, the device sends an automated signal to the speech recognition software in the cloud. It interprets the audio and converts it immediately into the text format for the device.
However, for audio conversions into text, Alexa always relies on some specific characteristics of the speech like frequency and pitch – it helps Alexa provide more accurate results to the users. It also has an auto-decoder that determines the sequence of words with the help of input features. Later on, the auto-decoder splits the word sequence into two parts – the first one provides you with a sequence that consists of huge amounts of existing texts, and the second one features the acoustic model which is connected with deep learning. It works by identifying the pairings of transcripts and audios. Once these parts are combined with each other, the dynamic coding gets applied for further language processing.
However, as Alexa relies on the internet, you need to ensure having stable internet connectivity at home before giving your commands to the device. For your convenience, you can always rely on a high-coverage internet provider like Grande Internet so that Alexa is able to respond quickly to your instructions. without any significant lags.
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Alexa’s Analysis of an “Order”
Alexa analyzes our commands in three parts – Wake word, Invocation name, and Utterance.
Let’s find out how it works!
Wake Word
As we mentioned earlier, Alexa uses a high-processing Wake Detection software to activate the device. Once you set Alexa into the listening mode, it is ready to respond to all types of commands.
Invocation Name
The invocation name is a type of keyword that can be used to ‘trigger’ some specific skills into Alexa. For example, the users can easily combine the invocation name with any command, action, or question.
Here’s a typical example of an invocation name:
Alexa “skills”: Voice-Driven Alexa capabilities.
Utterance
Utterances can be termed as some specific phrases that are used while making requests to Alexa. For example, you might consider ‘Taurus’ as an utterance for the device – Alexa determines your speech intent from the given utterance and responds to it accordingly.
In simple words, the utterance decides what does the user wants Alexa to perform.
After that, Alexa’s enabled devices send the users’ instructions to AVS, which is a cloud-based service for Alexa.
How Does Alexa Get Smarter Every Day?
It’s interesting how Alexa keeps getting smarter each day – there are major upgrades and improvements every now and then that further help to enhance the speech recognition and natural language understanding software systems in the device.
Interestingly, besides English, Alexa is fully trained to respond in many other languages as well like Spanish, Japanese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, and more. Therefore, the developers are coming up with more improvements in language processing areas so that Alexa is able to identify different languages’ speech patterns, accents, dialects, and vocabulary.
Conclusion
Although we have pretty much covered all the major aspects of Alexa’s functioning in this article, if still you wish to know more about it, do check out this mini-guide by Amazon. It would provide you with a complete overview of the product, along with its functioning power, features, privacy controls, etc.
However, before you click on the above-mentioned link, just make sure that you are connected to a high-speed, and reliable internet connection like Grande Internet so that your webpage does not take excessive time to load. If you wish to know more about Grande’s latest internet plans and deals, then do check out BuyTVInternetPhone.
