You probably spend long hours with Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant. She, the patient, responds with humor and wit when you try to make her dizzy. But no, he does not just speak Castilian. In fact, Siri is an entire multilingual capable of communicating in 24 languages and can distinguish the peculiarities of the same language in different countries. Logically, the same Spanish is not spoken in Spain as in Mexico and she is able to adapt according to her interlocutor.
How does Siri learn a new language? According to Alex Acero, the head of Apple’s virtual assistant speaking team, the process begins with people of flesh and blood.
When Siri confronts a new language, people are sought with different accents and dialects of the same language. They read paragraphs and lists of words that are transcribed by hand so that the computer has an exact representation of the text. In this way, a first model of language constructed is able to precede sequences of words. That is launched, although not included in Siri. It does this in dictation as a feature of iOS. And MacOS by pressing the microphone key next to the spacebar.
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For what? Simple, to continue perfecting it with more samples of real voice with ambient sound. And, above all, with a much more natural speech, with pauses or coughs. These samples are again transcribed by hand, a process that is repeated over and over again until the failure rate is reduced almost to a minimum. That’s when the new language is launched in Siri. Although you do not expect it to interact with you: now you will only have preset answers to common questions.
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The new language is improving progressively thanks to the users themselves. In fact, Siri’s response database is updated every two weeks. What does this mean? That perhaps today you ask something to Siri for which she has no answer, but in a few days if you find it.
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Throughout this process, AI (artificial intelligence) plays a fundamental role. Although humans play a fundamental role in the functioning of virtual assistants today, it will not be so in the future, when the AI acquires all the protagonist. In fact, the more you interact with it, the more it will improve and you can anticipate your needs. It’s just a question of use.
What about the rest of virtual assistants?
Although it was the first, Siri is not alone. They accompany him, – yes yes, in other devices – Cortana from Microsoft, Google Assistant or Alexa from Amazon. That will soon join Bixby from Samsung.
The virtual assistant of the Redmond supports 8 languages, Google Assistant to 4 (among which is not Spanish) and Alexa to 2.