Voice Systems Recap

In the past three months that I have been tracking Alexa, the numbers of skills in the Alexa store have been growing from 1600 in November,  4000 in January to 8700 today February 9th 2017. The growth in the skills is doubling in less than a month.  Considering that between June 1055 and 2016 they had experienced a 0-1400 in a year and added a mere 200 in the following 5 months.

Amazon Alexa Skills Growth

This signifies that the ecosystem is booming. The quality of the skills available is also improving significantly over the last two months. Based on the capabilities available to developers, skills today have significantly better abilities than just a few months back.
Over the past month I have met two types of people, those that have used Alexa can understand did development in the voice technologies and those that haven't. Folks that on Alexa and use it regularly understand the capabilities and utility off a voice interface. Folks that don't use Alexa have experience with Siri and Cortana, not really reflecting the true development in voice technologies.

The voice architecture

Based on my research so far, I have come to conclusion that the voice technology components can be summarized into the following.

The Voice Architecture

1. The human interface device: this is the primary mechanism by the which a user interaction with the system. For Amazon and Alexa this comes in the form off an Echo speaker or an AVS enabled system from one of the hardware Vendors partnering with Amazon.
2. The speech to text module: this is the component that has achieve significant breakthroughs in the past couple of years. Microsoft last week announced deck the speech to text technology is on par with humans for dictation.
3. Text to speech module: this compliments the speech to text in converting return text into speech. Most off the voice systems today support speech synthesis markup language that provides control over how the human interface device when does the text as speech.
4. Natural language processing System: this consists off two separate modules the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) module and the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) modules. These work in tandem to recognize the context as well as the intent of speech by the user so that the system can react appropriately.
5. The next set of modules signified as the Switchboard, the Voice Interface and the Apps sit behind this front-end voice stack and generate conversational content in the right domain.

All of the different vendors provide different interfaces for applications to leverage the voice interface, the mechanics of using the stack is quite similar. Users utterance is captured by the human interface device processed by speech to text and NLU to identify intent we just passed onto the right application for processing. The application is responsible for handling the request and generating the response which is conveyed back to the user through the human interface device.

There has been significant advances in the entire stack that makes the system viable and usable with a relatively moderate amount of effort. My previous posts have attempted to journal the research and try to validate my thoughts and my hypothesis that Conversation design requires a new approach to user interface. This appears to be on the right track #conversationdesign.