AI voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa have become part of our everyday lives. But for people with atypical voices, including those with conditions like Parkinson’s disease and muscular dystrophy, these tools can be frustrating to use. Now a number of big tech companies including Amazon and Google, as well as research organizations are coming up with ways to make them more useful. What will it take to create voice assistants that work for everyone right out of the box? 

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Further reading:

Tech Firms Train Voice Assistants to Understand Atypical Speech 

Amazon Makes Alexa Chattier and More Capable Using Generative AI  

Alexa, Siri, Cortana: Why All Your Bots Are Female   

Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition (2014, arXiv)  

Librispeech: An ASR corpus based on public domain audio books (2015, IEEE International Conference)  

Speech Accessibility Project from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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