Read interesting articles with news, trends and opinions from ayfie’s experienced team of experts.

Hey Siri, When Will Voice Assistants Improve?

Posted by Susanne Ullrich on Jan 18, 2019 12:37:59 PM

Natural Language Processing (NLP), the tech behind Voice Assistants, is still evolving. We find ourselves frustrated with Siri and Alexa when they misinterpret our commands, but the future for NLP and Voice Assistants looks great nonetheless.

++This article was originally published on IoT For All on January, 15th 2019 as a guest article by our CTO Johannes Stiehler.++

Topics: blogpost, english, siri, alexa, cortana, voice assistants, Smart Assistants, NLP

How smart are Smart Assistants? Limits and opportunities of Siri, Alexa, Cortana & Co.

Posted by Susanne Ullrich on Dec 12, 2018 4:37:48 PM

Nowadays, smart assistants can be found almost everywhere - in mobile phones, homes, cars. They are called Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant, Bixby & Co. Their intention is to act as a personal assistant and make our lives easier: We tell them what we want, and they do it. Well, at least they should. But sometimes, or as some would say most of the time, it just doesn't work. Either they don't understand us or they do understand us but misinterpret or give the wrong answers to our questions. 

We recently held a Webinar on why this is happening, and what the challenges for modern technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are. Our Director of Product Management and Natural Language Processing (NLP) expert Christian Schömmer, delivered fascinating insights on how the different modules need to interweave to create a digital assistant that works perfectly. This blog post is a summary of the key talking points of the webinar. 

Topics: english, blogpost, Smart Assistants, AI, Digital Assistant, Webinar, NLP

New ayfie Webinar: Smart Assistants, why are you so dumb?

Posted by Susanne Ullrich on Nov 16, 2018 9:13:03 AM

How smart are Smart Assistants? Have you ever tried to get an answer from Siri, Alexa, Cortana & Co. on more sophisticated questions like "What should I do tonight?", "Do you have any feedback on that article for me?" or "When should the next board meeting happen?". If you did, you might have realized that the answers seem not very smart - you might even go as far as say a bit dumb.

Digital Assistants have been around for quite a while now, but still many people tend to be disappointed by the results when using them in their daily life. Without a doubt, Smart Assistants try their best to help, but often they misunderstand, misinterpret and malfunction. Different modules need to interweave to create a digital assistant that works perfectly. For a Smart Assistant to act on requests that are all given in a natural language, a couple of things need to happen.

Topics: blogpost, english, Webinar, Content, Smart Assistants, AI, Digital Assistant, NLP