Tornado Alley (PROG)

[janice shell]

I think this would be an excellent product! What could possibly go wrong?

The Her Talking Phone May Have Arrived—She Speaks Chinese

The company behind TikTok is rolling out a smartphone AI assistant that behaves less like an app and more like a secretary

BY DENI ELLIS BÉCHARD EDITED BY CLAIRE CAMERON

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bytedance-launches-doubao-real-time-ai-voice-assistant-for-phones/

To give you an idea what it does...

The assistant also has memory, allowing it to store information on the device—meeting notes, addresses, a child’s age and preferences—and turn them into reminders or to-do items. Users can ask questions like “Which seat was I in on last week’s train?” or “Where was that café I liked near the office?”

It’s a leap up from older voice assistants such as Apple’s Siri, which operate in such a way that the responses can suffer from a lag and a lack of emotional nuances. In these systems, speech is recorded, turned into text and sent to a server for analysis, and the response is then read aloud by a separate text-to-speech tool. ByteDance’s AI, by contrast, uses a speech-to-speech system that allows for faster answers and even for the user to interrupt the assistant mid-sentence—much in the same the way you might interrupt a friend or a co-worker.

Oh yeah. What I want from a phone is emotional nuance. I've had Apple phones since 2007, and I've used Siri about three times. And I think it's a very poor idea to let your phone spend money without asking you if it's okay. I know, I know, I'm old...