Apple's Siri learns Shanghainese as voice
assistants race to cover languages
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[March 09, 2017]
By Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - With the broad
release of Google Assistant last week, the voice-assistant wars are in
full swing, with Apple Inc <AAPL.O>, Amazon.com Inc <AMZN.O>, Microsoft
Corp <MSFT.O> and now Alphabet Inc's <GOOGL.O> Google all offering
electronic assistants to take your commands.
Siri is the oldest of the bunch, and researchers including Oren Etzioni,
chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial
Intelligence in Seattle, said Apple has squandered its lead when it
comes to understanding speech and answering questions.
But there is at least one thing Siri can do that the other assistants
cannot: speak 21 languages localized for 36 countries, a very important
capability in a smartphone market where most sales are outside the
United States.
Microsoft Cortana, by contrast, has eight languages tailored for 13
countries. Google’s Assistant, which began in its Pixel phone but has
moved to other Android devices, speaks four languages. Amazon's Alexa
features only English and German. Siri will even soon start to learn
Shanghainese, a special dialect of Wu Chinese spoken only around
Shanghai.
The language issue shows the type of hurdle that digital assistants
still need to clear if they are to become ubiquitous tools for operating
smartphones and other devices.
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Speaking languages natively is complicated for any assistant. If someone
asks for a soccer score in Britain, for example, even though the
language is English, the assistant must know to say “two-nil” instead of
“two-nothing.”
At Microsoft, an editorial team of 29 people works to customize Cortana
for local markets. In Mexico, for example, a published children’s book
author writes Cortana’s lines to stand out from other Spanish-speaking
countries.
“They really pride themselves on what’s truly Mexican. (Cortana) has a
lot of answers that are clever and funny and have to do with what it
means to be Mexican,” said Jonathan Foster, who heads the team of
writers at Microsoft.
Google and Amazon said they plan to bring more languages to their
assistants but declined to comment further.
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![](../images/030917pics/news_n23.jpg)
CEO Tim Cook talks about Siri during an Apple event in San
Francisco, California March 7, 2012. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith
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At Apple, the company starts working on a new language by bringing in
humans to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are
then transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of
the spoken text to learn from, said Alex Acero, head of the speech team
at Apple. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices.
From there, a language model is built that tries to predict words
sequences.
Then Apple deploys “dictation mode,” its text-to-speech translator,
in the new language, Acero said. When customers use dictation mode,
Apple captures a small percentage of the audio recordings and makes
them anonymous. The recordings, complete with background noise and
mumbled words, are transcribed by humans, a process that helps cut
the speech recognition error rate in half.
After enough data has been gathered and a voice actor has been
recorded to play Siri in a new language, Siri is released with
answers to what Apple estimates will be the most common questions,
Acero said. Once released, Siri learns more about what real-world
users ask and is updated every two weeks with more tweaks.
But script-writing does not scale, said Charles Jolley, creator of
an intelligent assistant named Ozlo. “You can’t hire enough writers
to come up with the system you’d need in every language. You have to
synthesize the answers,” he said. That is years off, he said.
The founders of Viv, a startup founded by Siri's original creators
that Samsung acquired last year, is working on just that.
"Viv was built to specifically address the scaling issue for
intelligent assistants," said Dag Kittlaus, the CEO and co-founder
of Viv. "The only way to leapfrog today's limited functionality
versions is to open the system up and let the world teach them."
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Lisa
Shumaker)
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