As reported by the press service of Yandex, Alice learned to respond to the user's whisper and whisper in response. At the same time, the voice assistant is able to distinguish a hoarse and deaf voice (for example, with a cold) from a whisper.

“Alice is loved in many ways because she looks like a person. You can joke and chat with her, she has her own character and sense of humor. Whispering is another human manifestation that is now characteristic of Alice. I must say that she has already mastered several voice options. For example, Alisa leads the morning show cheerfully and cheerfully, and translates the video in a more phlegmatic way so as not to distract from watching, ”says Sergey Melnik, head of smart devices at Yandex.

Alice mastered whispering in several stages. At first, she learned to understand when a person is whispering. As Yandex pointed out, people whisper without using their vocal cords, so the sound spectrum of whispering and ordinary speech is different. But the neural network often confused a whisper with a dull and hoarse voice, since they are very similar in spectrum. The developers had to separately teach the assistant to distinguish these sounds.

To train the neural network, Yandex recorded several hours of whispering performed by the actress Tatyana Shitova, who voiced Alice. In addition, the developers trained the assistant on a pre-prepared base, in which they marked at what moments the person whispered. Thanks to these exercises, Alice learned to switch from a normal voice to a whisper.

Since her inception, Alice has been constantly working on her speech: she learns to emphasize words, pause and communicate so that she becomes more and more like a person. In mid-November, Yandex announced that it had taught the voice assistant to read books through the "Reader" in the Yandex application. The assistant was trained on many hours of voice-over recordings from professional announcers, thanks to which Alice sounds more natural. How the voice assistant's speech has changed and how it will develop further, Yandex tells in its blog in e.

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