Alexa Won’t Wake Your Kid Up Anymore
- Mehedi Hassan
- Oct 18, 2018
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Smart speakers make controlling your smart home and lots of other things incredibly easy with your voice. Often times, though, the voice assistants powering these smart speakers can be quite disruptive.
And Amazon is tackling that problem with a new Whisper Mode for Alexa and Alexa-powered devices. With the new Whisper Mode, when you whisper to Alexa, she will whisper back. And that’s going to be really useful when you don’t want to disrupt anyone, like when your kid is sleeping. You can simply whisper to Alexa to play a lullaby without waking your kid up, for example.
Amazon detailed in a blog post how the company is using machine learning to understand whispered speech. The ability of Alexa to identify when you are whispering to the assistant is really quite impressive from a technical perspective, and Amazon is utilizing a bunch of different techniques for its whisper detection system on Alexa. The company’s engineers even published a paper on the tech.
Whisper Mode isn’t enabled by default on Alexa — the feature is only available in the United States and you will have to manually turn it on for the feature to work.