What are Smart Speakers? How do Smart Speakers work?

 Smart Speaker

       Smart Speakers have become very popular nowadays with variety of them available in market from different manufacturers.

       Smart Speakers are speakers that are able to perform various functions from turning on the lights and fans, making a call, give weather updates, set an alarm or a reminder and much more. They can also play music to the speakers themselves. As Iron man has 'Jarvis' as his personal assistant smart speakers can be said to be as our "Virtual Assistants"

 How Do Smart Speakers work?

     The working of the smart speakers is based on the Voice Recognition Technology that is used. It is with the help of this technology, that the speaker is able to understand what is being said and act accordingly.

       Various manufacturers use different voice recognition systems. For e.g. Microsoft uses Cortana, Apple uses its Siri voice recognition assistant, Google uses their own Google assistant for this purpose and Amazon Echo series uses their own Alexa voice recognition systems.

       Even if all the smart speakers vary from each other, they all work on a basic concept which is common among them. The most common factor among all is that they all need a 'wake word' that activates them to start listening to all the speech. Mostly a default word is set by the manufacturer that works as a wake word. For e.g. Apple smart speakers awaits for the word "Hey Siri" to start listening to the speaker.

Apple smart speakers awaits for the word "Hey Siri" to start listening to the speaker.

      On hearing this wake up word, the system gets activated and starts recording what is being said and sends this over the Internet to the main processing area or the voice recognition service for the system. For Amazon, the speech file is sent to the Amazon's Alexa Voice Services (AVS) in the cloud. The voice recognition system then understands the speech and gives response to the speaker. 
   
      The voice recognition systems makes use of a series of algorithm which results in the system becoming more familiar with the words you use and individual speech patterns. By this way, it learns how you speak so the system can provide a better service.

      In fact, it becomes a necessity that while setting up a smart speaker system you have to run through a learning process for the smart speaker.

How does the Smart Speaker recognizes Speech?

     The speech recognition technology has been developed largely in recent years and has various uses which include smart speakers. We as a human can perform speech recognition ourselves, while talking to others, but is is a very complex process in case of computers.

      Computers are programmed to recognize "phones" which are sections of words. These are then linked with other phones to build "phonemes" which are effectively different words.
      

Data Security in use of Smart Speakers

Many people avoid using smart speakers due to the issue of data security

        Many people avoid using smart speakers due to the issue of data security. People may become victims of voice hacking. This is done by recording or mimicking a user’s voice and then hijacking their accounts.

        It has also been brought to notice that many automatic speaker verification systems are not able to detect whether the speech has been previously recorded, although systems are now being developed to detect this.

       Another problem involves smart speakers recording speeches from a nearby radio or television and responding to them. However, this doesn't seem to be a much bigger problem.

       There is also an issue that the WiFi network and all the devices connected to it including the smart speaker need to have strong and complex passwords. If the user keeps the device’s password set to default thinking that nobody would be interested in hacking their system, there is a high chance that the hackers can gain access into its systems easily.

      The smart speaker technology is growing rapidly and is going to affect our lives greatly. It will also extend its area of applications, and enable more areas of everyday life to be controlled by voice command.