‍ Introduction:

Google Home is a wise speaker powered by Google Assistant while Alexa is that the virtual smart assistant behind Amazon's Echo smart speaker. Amazon Alexa, also known simply as Alexa,[2] may be a virtual assistant technology. Google Nest, previously named Google Home, may be a line of smart speakers developed by Google under the Google Nest brand. The devices enable users to talk voice commands to interact with services through Google Assistant, the company's virtual assistant.

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What is a Virtual Assistant?:

A virtual assistant may be a remote employee who is trained and experienced to assist you and your team on a variety of tasks like email management, answering phone calls, managing company database, making travel arrangements, handling social media handles and far more. An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) or intelligent personal assistant (IPA) could be a software agent which will perform tasks or services for a private supported commands or questions. The term "chatbot" is usually wont to visit virtual assistants generally or specifically accessed by online chat.

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How does a Virtual Assistant work:

1. Wake Word:

                        For a virtual assistant to respond to your request, your device must first detect the wake word, but how does your device know that you’ve said the wake word? Echo devices use built-in technology that matches what you’ve said to the acoustic patterns of the wake word. This technology is called “keyword spotting.” In Alexa case, When the device detects the wake word, it sends your request to Amazon’s secure cloud, where the cloud’s more powerful capabilities verify the wake word as your request is being processed. After confirmation, an answer to your request is sent back to you. For example, when you say, "Alexa, play top hits from Amazon Music," they use the recording of your request and information from Amazon Music to play top hits for you on your device.

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2) How does the Virtual Assistant get smarter every day?

  They use our requests to assistant to train their speech recognition and natural language understanding systems using machine learning. Training virtual Assistant with real world requests from a diverse range of customers is necessary for it to respond properly to the variation in our customers’ speech patterns, dialects, accents, and vocabulary and the acoustic environments where customers use the virtual Assistant. This training relies in part on supervised machine learning, an industry-standard practice where humans review an extremely small sample of requests to help the assistant understand the correct interpretation of a request and provide the appropriate response in the future.

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3)Invocation name:

    Invocation name is the keyword used to trigger a specific “skill”. Users can combine the invocation name with an action, command or question. All the custom skills must have an invocation name to start.

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4) Utterance:

             ‘Taurus’ is an utterance. Utterances are phrases the users will use when making a request to Alexa. Alexa identifies the user’s intent from the given utterance and responds accordingly. So basically, the utterance decides what user want Alexa to perform.After, Alexa enabled devices sends the user’s instruction to a cloud-based service called Alexa Voice Service (AVS). Alexa Voice Service process the response and identify the user’s intent, then it makes the web service request to third party server if needed.

5) Natural Language Processing:

          It’s a convergence of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics which handles interactions between machines and natural languages of humans in which computers are entailed to analyze, understand, alter, or generate natural language (NL) helps computer machines to engage in communication using natural human language in many forms, including but not limited to speech and writing. Natural language: any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages can take different forms, such as speech or signing.After, it converts them into Artificial language like speech recognition. Here we get the data into a textual form which NLU (Natural Language Understanding) process to understand the meaning.A good rule is to use the term NLU if you’re just talking about a machine’s ability to understand what we say. NLU is actually a subset of the wider world of NLP.

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Conclusion:

             An excellent virtual assistant will save time and money by doing the small tasks for you and doing them accurately and with high quality. If you handle the virtual assistant correctly, it will be a boom in your business.

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Written by K. Chaitanya Pranav Sai, a Siliconvalley4u's student