As one of the most popular smart hardware devices today, smart speakers are equipped with voice assistants that are favored by consumers. Users can give commands to voice assistants to complete many tasks, such as querying the real-time weather conditions of a certain place, obtaining the route to a specific location and road information, playing a specific style, a specific singer's specific song, enjoying a comic or commentary, and controlling the switch on and off of a household appliance.
Although smart speaker voice assistants can provide consumers with many services, they still have certain shortcomings, one of which is the lack of the qualities of a real human voice, such as the lack of emotional color. However, relevant improvement measures are already underway.
According to relevant reports, the team that has been working hard on innovation has developed more realistic speaking functions for the voice assistant of smart speakers. The new feature, named "Emotional Speech," allows the voice assistant to communicate with an emotional tone, such as excitement or disappointment.
The new feature utilizes neural voice conversion technology. This technology allows the voice assistant to start a conversation with the user in a more natural tone. For example, when a user gives the right answer to a trivia question, the voice assistant will respond with a happy or excited tone, while when the user's favorite sports team loses a game, the voice assistant will give comfort in a sad tone.
One study has shown that when voice assistants communicate with users in a more natural-sounding voice, especially one that is excited, users like them significantly more: "Early customer feedback shows that overall user satisfaction with the voice experience increases by 30% when voice assistants respond with an emotional voice."
This new feature allows voice assistants to express themselves in voices with varying levels of excitement or sadness, being able to present emotions such as excitement or disappointment at low, medium and high intensities.
In addition, the team is also working on new "speaking styles" for voice assistants. In addition to communicating using standard speech, voice assistants are now able to engage in conversations using new "news" and "music" speech styles. Users in some regions will even be able to have the voice assistant communicate in a localized news speaking style. Both of these styles are more natural than the standard voice style.
However, the new "emotional voice" feature is currently only available to developers. There's no word yet on when it will be available to the general public.
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