科技巨头打响语音助手大战 Siri将学说上海话

据路透社报道，随着谷歌助理上周开始大范围登陆安卓设备，语音助手行业的竞争进入白热化。现在，苹果、亚马逊、微软以及谷歌都在提供能够接受用户指令的虚拟助手。专家表示，要想打赢语音助手大战，必须跨越语言障碍的鸿沟，而苹果Siri作为业内老前辈，已经遥遥领先其他几家语音助手，它不仅会说36个国家的21种语言，如今还要学习上海方言。

With the broad release of Google Assistant last week, the voice-assistant wars are in full swing, with Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft Corp and now Alphabet Inc's Google all offering electronic assistants to take your commands.

随着谷歌公司上周全面推出谷歌助手服务，苹果、亚马逊、微软以及谷歌都推出了接受人类指令的语音助手服务，一场语音助手战已全面打响。

Siri会21种语言 现在将学说上海话

Siri is the oldest of the bunch, and researchers including Oren Etzioni, chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, said Apple has squandered its lead when it comes to understanding speech and answering questions.

Siri是这些服务中的老前辈。许多研究人员，包括位于西雅图的艾伦人工智能研究所的首席执行官奥伦•埃齐奥尼在内，都认为在语音识别和回答问题方面，苹果的领先优势已消耗殆尽。

But there is at least one thing Siri can do that the other assistants cannot: speak 21 languages localized for 36 countries, a very important capability in a smartphone market where most sales are outside the United States.

不过，至少有一件事是Siri可以但其竞争对手做不到的，即会说36个国家的21种语言。这个功能在智能手机市场至关重要，因为大部分智能手机都是销往美国以外的地区的。

Microsoft Cortana, by contrast, has eight languages tailored for 13 countries. Google's Assistant, which began in its Pixel phone but has moved to other Android devices, speaks four languages. Amazon's Alexa features only English and German. Siri will even soon start to learn Shanghainese, a special dialect of Wu Chinese spoken only around Shanghai.

微软“小娜”为13个国家定制了8种语言。谷歌语音助手会说4种语言，该服务一开始只在谷歌自家的Pixel手机里有，后来又应用到其他安卓设备。亚马逊的Alexa只会说英语和德语。而Siri甚至马上要开始学说上海话了，这是一种只在上海及其周边地区使用的吴语方言。

The language issue shows the type of hurdle that digital assistants still need to clear if they are to become ubiquitous tools for operating smartphones and other devices.

这说明，智能助手要想成为无所不在的智能手机和其他设备操控工具，就必须跨越语言的障碍。

At Microsoft, an editorial team of 29 people works to customise Cortana for local markets. Google and Amazon said they plan to bring more languages to their assistants but declined to comment further.

微软公司一个29人的编辑团队正着手推出面向地方市场的定制“小娜”服务。谷歌和亚马逊都表示计划给它们的语音助手添加更多种语言，但两家公司均拒绝透露更多消息。

你知道苹果是怎么教Siri学习方言吗？

At Apple, the company starts working on a new language by bringing in humans to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are then transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of the spoken text to learn from, said Alex Acero, head of the speech team at Apple. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices. From there, an acoustic model is built that tries to predict words sequences.

苹果语音团队负责人亚历克斯•阿赛罗说，当公司研发人员开始教Siri一门新的语言时，会让真人用各种方言和口音来阅读文本段落，然后再手动转录，这样计算机就可以拥有准确学习样本。苹果还会从不同的声音中捕捉各种语音。然后，苹果会建立起一个声学模型，并通过这个模型开始尝试预测字符序列。

Then Apple deploys "dictation mode," its text-to-speech translator, in the new language, Acero said. When customers use dictation mode, Apple captures a small percentage of the audio recordings and makes them anonymous. The recordings, complete with background noise and mumbled words, are transcribed by humans, a process that helps cut the speech recognition error rate in half.

苹果随后会在新语言中部署“听写模式”，这是一种文本和语音之间的 After enough data has been gathered and a voice actor has been recorded to play Siri in a new language, Siri is released with answers to what Apple estimates will be the most common questions, Acero said. Once released, Siri learns more about what real-world users ask and is updated every two weeks with more tweaks.

阿赛罗说，在收集了足够的数据，并让配音员为Siri录制了新语言之后，Siri就会向公众开放，刚发布时Siri能够回答苹果认为最常见的问题。发布之后，Siri将会从用户的实际问题中学习，并且会每两周更新一次，作出一些调整。

But script-writing does not scale, said Charles Jolley, creator of an intelligent assistant named Ozlo. “You can't hire enough writers to come up with the system you'd need in every language. You have to synthesize the answers,” he said. That is years off, he said.

不过，智能助理Ozlo的创始人查尔斯•乔利表示，撰写脚本无法做到规模化，“你不可能聘请足够多的作者为每一种语言撰写需要的脚本，你必须人工合成答案。”他认为，这还需要多年的时间。

The founders of Viv, a startup founded by Siri's original creators that Samsung acquired last year, is working on just that.

三星去年收购了“Siri之父”创建的人工智能公司Viv，这家初创公司的创始人正在着手解决这个问题。

"Viv was built to specifically address the scaling issue for intelligent assistants," said Dag Kittlaus, the CEO and co-founder of Viv. "The only way to leapfrog today's limited functionality versions is to open the system up and let the world teach them."

Viv的联合创始人兼CEO戴格•吉特拉斯说：“Viv旨在专攻智能助理的规模化问题，要想跨过目前版本的功能局限，唯一的方法就是开放系统，让世界来教它们。”