In a patent which was made public by the company today shows that Amazon will now allow the company’s voice assistant Alexa to go for recording audio before even users say the Wake word to this assistant.
Earlier, Amazon has filed a patent application in US Patent and Trademark Office in which it describes that the technology is all set to allow the Echo as well as other Alexa-enabled services to get the order from humans even before you say the Wake word to them. For now, Alexa is the only device which helps in recording as well as sending the audio to the Amazon servers if that word got detected. It is said that Amazon is all set to develop as well as implement this technology in the Alexa-enabled device which will constantly be recording as well as deleting the things that you say by using the device’s local memory storage.
If the speaker wants to order Alexa or wants to store commands before the wake word, then the speaker will need to continue the recording. With this new feature in Alexa, it shows to raise a few eyebrows from the privacy-aware users. So, in future, if this is ever implemented as the feature, then it is said that it will be optional and the patent will say that users will choose to store between 10 to 30 seconds of audio before waking up.
In the patent application, it was made public that this will be offering you with the insight into Amazon’s ambitions, which will help you in expanding all the capabilities for the voice recognition technology. The Alexa devices currently can’t take the commands when the wake word comes after or during the middle of the sentences.
According to Kurt Wesley Piersol and Gabriel Beddingfield, who are the authors of the patent said that these phrases are very much natural for a user when they use this with the current speech processing systems. They are not configured to handle all the commands which are not preceded by the wake word.
As per Amazon spokesperson, this technology that is given in the patent is said to be not in use. It refers to the potential use of the patents, which is very highly speculative. Spokesperson of Amazon added by saying that all the Amazon files which have got many patent applications which are not ultimately implemented to the consumer-facing products, as well as other patents, will not necessarily reflect the current or near future states of products as well as other services.
In this patent, it was said that when Alexa hears the word Wake, it starts to look back to determine about the wake word and the pauses that are used in the speech which helps in identifying the beginning of the command. After that, the audio will be sent from the device to Amazon servers in which they will be fully processing, and the idea is very much similar to Apple’s Live Photos technology.