Servo - July 2016

three popular computer/smartphone based verbally accessed personal assistants that I would like to discuss with possible uses for robots.

The first is Siri — Apple’s acronym for Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface — which is an intelligent personal assistant accessible via verbal interaction with Apple’s iOS on mobile tablet computers and smartphones.

The application was first developed by Siri, Inc., which was purchased by Apple in April 2010. Siri was introduced as a feature of the iPhone 4S in October 2011, the icon of which is shown in Figure 4. The natural language interface can answer questions, plus perform tasks and actions by delegating requests to specific Internet services. Siri adapts to the user’s individual language and information searches with continued usage to create more individualized responses.

When we hear a Siri response, most of us never realize just how it is produced. It’s not a synthesized voice response in the normal sense, but the piecing together of many previously recorded words to form the response. Back in 2005, voice-over artist Susan Bennett spent the month of July recording thousands of words for four hours a day. She had no idea at the time what her words would be used for. In an interview about first hearing her voice on an iPhone in 2011, she commented, “When I discovered it was my voice ... to be honest, it was a little creepy. This little thing that you can interact with in your hands took awhile for me to get used to, but she Siri is still quite popular with iPhone users and is a very capable speech-controlled app that can do amazing things. Folks seem to enjoy the witty responses that were programmed in for the inevitable crazy questions.

Microsoft’s Cortana

Cortana is available on Windows

10 computers to: “ ... help you find things on your PC, manage your calendar, track packages, find files, chat with you, and tell jokes. The more you use Cortana, the more personalized your experience will be.

Cortana is your clever new personal assistant,” touts Microsoft literature and ads.

Cortana builds off Microsoft’s previous voice technology called TellMe, purchased by Microsoft in 2009. Released back in April 2014, the name Cortana is a synthetic intelligence character in Microsoft’s Halo video game shown in Figure 5. It has been applied to computers and smartphones as a verbal personal assistant.

Cortana’s voice content is not like Siri’s. Microsoft currently synthesizes multiple voices for the app, but players of the Halo game will recognize Cortana’s voice on their iPhones. That is because the majority of Cortana is voiced by Jen Taylor, the game’s original voice. Microsoft likes to refer to Cortana not as a Siri copy, but as Artificial Intelligence since it is also destined to be the digital assistant for their new Windows phone.

Like Siri, Cortana was designed to have a built-in personality, much like Scarlett Johansson’s AI voice in the film, Her. She was supposed to sound caring and confident, but some view her voice as a bit snide and bossy. Her responses were designed to be what Microsoft calls ‘chit chat’ in casual conversations.

The majority of Cortana’s functions are to make calls, set reminders, and answer questions. She is designed to learn more about her user through time by remembering names, places, specific questions, and the like, and replying with this knowledge in response to questions.

Cortana initially attempts to be fun by using the chit chat as a beginning to more serious questions later in a conversation — much like a human assistant. I have finally gotten used to Cortana on my computer.

Google Now

Google Now is the verbally accessed personal assistant developed by Google, and is available on Android, Apple iOS, and Google Chrome for PCs. Originally, the voice search project was under the codename ‘Majel’ — a reference to the female crewmember of the Starship Enterprise who was the voice of the AI computer. Amit Singhal, senior vice president at Google and Star Trek fan, is shown in Figure 6 using a prototype lapel pin modeled after the communicator badge from Star Trek.

The device never left the testing phase, and used a microphone and small speaker to listen to and respond to a user’s voice over a Bluetooth link connected to a search engine. (Sounds like a great robot controller to me!)

Google Now was first announced in mid 2012 and is intended as Google’s answer to Siri and Cortana. According to their site, “Google Now uses a natural language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of web services. Along with answering user-initiated queries, Google Now