Explore Conversational AI with smart speakers such as Google Home, Amazon Echo (Alexa), Microsoft Cortana, Apple Siri, Facebook (Portal with Alexa), and Samsung Bixby as one of the major emerging AI applications; digital assistants. We are particularly interested in this technology as (next generation) Multilingual Internet with many national languages in Asia.
Global market share in 2018: Google/32% , Amazon/25% , Alibaba/18% , Xiaomi/12% .[according to Canalys Newsroom- Global smart speaker shipments grew 187% year on year in Q2 2018]
Google plans to support Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Thai, Brazilian Portuguese (in addition to 6 languages now; English, French, Germany, Spanish, Italian and Japanese).
Samsung and Amazon (and Microsoft?) followed with around 4~6 languages.
Several companies in Korea in addition to Samsung have the smart speakers; LG(with Google), Kakao, Naver, and KT.
Companies including LINE in Japan have "AI Speakers", too.
We may start as BoF: Smart Speaker, and may hold the BoF session during 2019 APSIG.
Mailing List: APSIG-SmartSpeaker@googlegroups
Members: zolzoya, gj, yangyang, kilnam, shabbir, kashif adeel, shreedeep
References
EFF, You Bought Smart Speakers Over the Holidays. Now What Are Amazon and Google Doing With Your Data?, (2019.1 by Mother Jones).
Susan Engelson, Smart Speaker Penetration Hits 20% of U.S. Wi-Fi Households, 2018.4.
ET Times, AI Speakers, 2018.9.13. [in Korean]
Forbes, Smart Speakers Flood South Korea, But Are The Country's Tech Giants Too Late To The Game?, 2017.11.
Fortune, 25 ways AI is changing businesses, November 2018.
Google Home, Change your Google Assistant language, 2018.8.1.
Google Home, Receive emails for your devices and the Google Assistant, 2018.8.1.
Google Assistant goes global, 2018.12. (with 30 languages)
MIT Technology Review, A man asked his data from Amazon (Alexa), 2018.12.27.
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Nikkei, Machine "ears" are evolving with AI, 2018.8.20. [in Japanese]
Mummahad Shabbir, Email Message: First-hand experience on Google Mini, 2018.8.1
Kaz Taira, Is there "AI discrimination" on smart speakers?, 2018.8.26. [in Japanese](based on Washington Post's article of 2018.7.19.
VB, 3 next steps on conversational AI, VB, 2018.7.
VB, Microsoft and Amazon launch Alexa-Cortana public preview for Echo speakers and Windows 10 PCs, 2018.8.
Washington Post, Accent gap, 2018.7.19.
Wikipedia, Smart Speaker.
Wired, Google has made the first multilingual virtual assistant, 2018.8.30.