Tag Archive for: Voice Activation

Nest Mini

 

 

The Google Home Mini has brought Google’s Google Assistant to millions of homes, now the second generation, the Nest Mini, is bringing some major improvements.

A new speaker with powerful sound

With the Nest Mini, the hardware and software have been updated to make it sound even better. The Nest Mini provides bass that is twice as strong as it’s predecessor.  The expert audio engineers at Google have developed propriety audio tuning software to get the most out of the hardware. Helping to provide full clear and natural sound at every volume level. Google didn’t want to suppress any auditory details so expect clear audio from the Nest Mini.

The Nest Mini’s LED lights will alight as your hands get close to the device to indicate where you can tap to adjust volume. It’s also been improved to hear you better in noisy environments. Furthermore the Nest Mini will dynamically adjust the volume of the assistant whilst playing media. So if you have a noisy washing machine, the assistant’s response will be played back at a louder volume.

Whole home audio

Connect the Nest Mini to other Nest speakers to build a sound system for the whole home. Even create different groups in the Google home app and enjoy music, podcasts and more all throughout your home.

You can also stream transfer your music from one speaker to another, even in another room! Plus you can transfer music from your phone to a speaker as soon as you walk through the door.

For example you can say, “Hey Google, move the music to the living room speaker” to keep the party going.

Now you can call your devices from the Google Home app, use the intercom feature to talk from device to device, or call someone on the other side of the world – for free! Just need a Duo account and/or a Google Home/Nest Smart Speaker or display!

Making the best Assistant better

Nest Mini is smarter and faster than it’s original. As Google has embedded a dedicated machine learning chip into it, with up to 1 TeraOPS of processing power (basically very very fast). Thus moving some Google Assistant experiences from the data centers straight on the device.

If you are in the US Nest Mini will now learn the most common commands that you give it and process them locally for an even faster response time!

Nest Mini is available for $49,  you can pre-order from the Google Store. Simply click here to order!

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Amazon workers allegedly have a chat room about ‘amusing’ recordings?!

Bloomberg have a report out that highlighted the human labour that goes into manufacturing and improving the Amazon Echo. Amazon have contractors and full time employees working on the Amazon Echo. They’re all over the globe and tasked with reviewing and transcribing clips. Clips that are of conversations between users and Alexa. According to the report from Bloomberg, humans are said to annotate interactions to help identify phrases. Phrases such as “Taylor Swift” that might otherwise be meaningless to the software.

“We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order improve the customer experience. For example, this information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone.

Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow. All information is treated with high confidentiality and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption and audits of our control environment to protect it,”an Amazon spokesman told Bloomberg.

Amazon Echo Chat Room

According Bloomberg, as a result of collating all this data, Amazon workers have a chat room. This chat room is intended for asking for help if they can’t make out a word or phrase. However, allegedly, they also share “amusing” recordings. Furthermore, an Amazon worker, told Bloomberg that each member of the team will listen to as much as 100 clips a day. Clips that Alexa has mistaken or unintentionally activated. Bloomberg have reported that one of these workers will review as many as 1,000 clips in a day! (A full 9hr working day shift)

In cases where the Alexa has tripped unintentionally, there has also been some serious recordings. According to the report, two workers who have spoken to Bloomberg. Who believe they heard a sexual assault taking place. Furthermore another two workers told Bloomberg that they were given guidance not to intervene. As Amazon didn’t consider it the company’s place to intervene in cases like these.

Full report with Bloomberg here

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