What is AI Voice Assistant?

‍“Hey, Google, will it rain today?”

AI voice assistants have become a big part of people’s daily lives without them even realizing it. AI voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant do so much for you every single day—from setting reminders of client meetings to creating grocery lists.

These AI voice assistants work by voice activation, which is highly convenient as it facilitates hands-free use. When powered by more robust artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, voice assistants have the potential to accomplish much more than simple tasks.

Keep reading to gain a comprehensive understanding of AI voice assistants and the technology they use, along with some examples and the future trends in the voice assistance nich

What Is an AI Voice Assistant?

In 1952, Bell Labs presented "Audrey", the Automatic Digit Recognition machine can recognize the digits zero to nine, with 90% accuracy, but only if spoken by its inventor. Yet even that is impressive for its time. In 2024, an AI voice assistant is an AI-powered software that you can interact with using voice commands to get assistance with various tasks or access to services. For example,  you can activate Apple’s Siri voice assistant using a command like “Hey Siri” and ask it to do things like open your calendar, read out a document, etc.

Voice assistants use a combination of technologies, such as NLP, speech recognition, and speech synthesis. Virtual assistants are powered by AI and machine learning (ML). Together, these technologies help the voice assistant derive context and intent from the user’s voice command, search for relevant information, and provide the required service as asked. For example, you can control smart home devices using voice commands on virtual assistants like Alexa.

What Key Technologies Are Behind AI Voice Assistants?

Let’s take a look at how AI and ML power the other technologies in these assistants:

1. Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a crucial component of AI voice assistants that helps them understand and process human language. Using NLP, voice digital assistants can:

• Transcribe Speech: Converts the spoken words into text, allowing the voice assistant to understand user input.
• Identify Speaker Intent: Helps the voice assistant understand the user's intent or objective behind the query and deliver relevant answers to users’ questions.
• Understand Context: Voice assistants correlate different parts of a conversation, maintaining context in their responses.
• Generate Relevant Responses: Helps assistants formulate relevant, humanlike responses.

2. Voice Recognition & Speech Synthesis

Voice recognition, also called Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), is what the AI assistants use to understand the spoken language accurately. It works in three steps:

• Acoustic Modelling: An acoustic sound model converts spoken words into a phoneme sequence.
• Language Modelling: A language model then predicts the sequence of words from the recognized phonemes and conversation context.
• Speaker Identification: ASR systems then look for unique voice characteristics to identify the speaker.

Speech synthesis (text to speech or TTS) helps smart speaker or the voice assistant analyze text and determine the correct intonation and pronunciation. It either works by selecting units of phonemes to convert into audio or directly synthesizes speech. The selected units or the synthesized speech are then combined to generate output audio.

What Are the Popular AI Voice Assistants?

Several popular AI voice assistants are in widespread use today:

1. Siri (Apple): Siri is an AI voice assistant deeply integrated within the Apple ecosystem. It is easy to interact with as it uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU). It can give proactive contextual suggestions like offering to make calls or play music.
2. Alexa (Amazon): Alexa is Amazon’s virtual assistant, capable of a wide range of skills and tasks. It is like smart speakers that can integrate with smart home devices and allow you to control them hands-free. Alexa also provides proactive assistance and many skills, like playing games.
3. Google Assistant (Google): Google Assistant is a competent voice assistant that can provide proactive assistance, smart home integration, multilingual support, integration with Google’s services, products, and more. You can use this voice assistant with Google Lens to get visual information based on what your camera sees.
4. Cortana (Microsoft): Cortana is a Microsoft-exclusive virtual assistant capable of understanding natural language, maintaining conversation context, providing proactive assistance, and more. It can integrate easily with MS Office and Windows to provide help while you work.

Applications and Use Cases of Voice Assistants

Let's take a look at some of the most exciting applications of voice assistants at home and work:

Personal Use Cases for Smart Home Devices and More

AI voice assistants make personal life easier by:

• Enabling smart controls for home gadgets and equipment, like lights, TVs, refrigerators, etc.
• Facilitating internet use through voice commands to search for handy things like recipes.
• Making hands-free tasks possible, such as taking notes, calling people, playing music, etc.
• Getting news or weather updates to plan your day better.
• Creating to-do lists, setting alarms and reminders, setting timers, etc.
• Managing everyone’s calendar through a family account by scheduling appointments, event reminders, etc.

Business and Industry Applications of Voice Assistants

Businesses across various industries have tremendous use for AI voice assistants for enhancing productivity:

• Healthcare: Healthcare professionals use voice assistants for voice-assisted patient monitoring, accessing patient records, scheduling appointments, setting medication reminders, and more.
• Customer Service: Businesses and service agents use AI voice assistants to automate customer queries, analyze customer emotions, provide real-time suggestions to agents to serve customers better.
• Retail: AI voice assistants have tremendous applications in retail, including virtual shopping assistants, order placement, FAQs, access to product information, managing returns and exchanges, and collecting feedback.

Conclusion

AI voice assistants simplify everyday life in numerous ways. For example, you can make Alexa take down notes for you instead of trying to find a pencil and paper immediately.  You can use Google Assistant to remind you to drink water every two hours.

Thus, voice assistants have become invaluable tools that enhance efficiency and convenience by automating routine tasks, facilitating communication and providing seamless access to information. This contributes toward better productivity, leading to a more balanced and manageable lifestyle.