Proving that it's much more motivated in learning languages than you are, Siri — Apple's beloved voice assistant — is brushing up on its Shanghainese, the special Wu dialect spoken only in the 'Hai.
Nong hao, Siri.
We'd expect nothing less of everyone's favorite sassy digital assistant. It already has 21 languages tailored for 36 countries under its belt because it's a total boss.
Other voice assistants pale in comparison. Microsoft's Cortana speaks a measly eight languages localized for 13 countries. (Lame). Google's Assistant only understands four. (Pathetic). And Amazon's Alexa just knows English and German. (Are you kidding me?) Zei. Wei.
How does Siri learn languages? Reuters explains:
"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.
"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.
"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."
It's unclear when Siri, Shanghainese edition will debut. But in the meantime, you can continue harassing Siri in Putonghua:
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