據路透社報道，隨著谷歌助理上周開始大范圍登陸安卓設備，語音助手行業的競爭進入白熱化。現在，蘋果、亞馬遜、微軟以及谷歌都在提供能夠接受用戶指令的虛擬助手。專家表示，要想打贏語音助手大戰，必須跨越語言障礙的鴻溝，而蘋果Siri作為業內老前輩，已經遙遙領先其他幾家語音助手，它不僅會說36個國家的21種語言，如今還要學習上海方言。

With the broad release of Google Assistant last week, the voice-assistant wars are in full swing, with Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft Corp and now Alphabet Inc's Google all offering electronic assistants to take your commands.
隨著谷歌公司上周全面推出谷歌助手服務，蘋果、亞馬遜、微軟以及谷歌都推出了接受人類指令的語音助手服務，一場語音助手戰已全面打響。

Siri會21種語言 現在將學說上海話

Siri is the oldest of the bunch, and researchers including Oren Etzioni, chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, said Apple has squandered its lead when it comes to understanding speech and answering questions.
Siri是這些服務中的老前輩。許多研究人員，包括位于西雅圖的艾倫人工智能研究所的首席執行官奧倫?埃齊奧尼在內，都認為在語音識別和回答問題方面，蘋果的領先優勢已消耗殆盡。

But there is at least one thing Siri can do that the other assistants cannot: speak 21 languages localized for 36 countries, a very important capability in a smartphone market where most sales are outside the United States.
不過，至少有一件事是Siri可以但其競爭對手做不到的，即會說36個國家的21種語言。這個功能在智能手機市場至關重要，因為大部分智能手機都是銷往美國以外的地區的。

Microsoft Cortana, by contrast, has eight languages tailored for 13 countries. Google's Assistant, which began in its Pixel phone but has moved to other Android devices, speaks four languages. Amazon's Alexa features only English and German. Siri will even soon start to learn Shanghainese, a special dialect of Wu Chinese spoken only around Shanghai.
微軟“小娜”為13個國家定制了8種語言。谷歌語音助手會說4種語言，該服務一開始只在谷歌自家的Pixel手機里有，后來又應用到其他安卓設備。亞馬遜的Alexa只會說英語和德語。而Siri甚至馬上要開始學說上海話了，這是一種只在上海及其周邊地區使用的吳語方言。

The language issue shows the type of hurdle that digital assistants still need to clear if they are to become ubiquitous tools for operating smartphones and other devices.
這說明，智能助手要想成為無所不在的智能手機和其他設備操控工具，就必須跨越語言的障礙。

At Microsoft, an editorial team of 29 people works to customise Cortana for local markets. Google and Amazon said they plan to bring more languages to their assistants but declined to comment further.
微軟公司一個29人的編輯團隊正著手推出面向地方市場的定制“小娜”服務。谷歌和亞馬遜都表示計劃給它們的語音助手添加更多種語言，但兩家公司均拒絕透露更多消息。

你知道蘋果是怎么教Siri學習方言嗎？

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.
蘋果語音團隊負責人亞歷克斯?阿賽羅說，當公司研發人員開始教Siri一門新的語言時，會讓真人用各種方言和口音來閱讀文本段落，然后再手動轉錄，這樣計算機就可以擁有準確學習樣本。蘋果還會從不同的聲音中捕捉各種語音。然后，蘋果會建立起一個聲學模型，并通過這個模型開始嘗試預測字符序列。

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.
蘋果隨后會在新語言中部署“聽寫模式”，這是一種文本和語音之間的翻譯器。當用戶使用聽寫模式時，蘋果會捕獲音頻錄音中的一小部分，然后對其匿名處理。由于這些錄音有背景噪音以及模糊不清的詞語，將會由專人轉錄，這一過程可以將語音識別的錯誤率降低一半。

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.
阿賽羅說，在收集了足夠的數據，并讓配音員為Siri錄制了新語言之后，Siri就會向公眾開放，剛發布時Siri能夠回答蘋果認為最常見的問題。發布之后，Siri將會從用戶的實際問題中學習，并且會每兩周更新一次，作出一些調整。

But script-writing does not scale, said Charles Jolley, creator of an intelligent assistant named Ozlo. “You can't hire enough writers to come up with the system you'd need in every language. You have to synthesize the answers,” he said. That is years off, he said.
不過，智能助理Ozlo的創始人查爾斯?喬利表示，撰寫腳本無法做到規模化，“你不可能聘請足夠多的作者為每一種語言撰寫需要的腳本，你必須人工合成答案。”他認為，這還需要多年的時間。

The founders of Viv, a startup founded by Siri's original creators that Samsung acquired last year, is working on just that.
三星去年收購了“Siri之父”創建的人工智能公司Viv，這家初創公司的創始人正在著手解決這個問題。

"Viv was built to specifically address the scaling issue for intelligent assistants," said Dag Kittlaus, the CEO and co-founder of Viv. "The only way to leapfrog today's limited functionality versions is to open the system up and let the world teach them."
Viv的聯合創始人兼CEO戴格?吉特拉斯說：“Viv旨在專攻智能助理的規模化問題，要想跨過目前版本的功能局限，唯一的方法就是開放系統，讓世界來教它們。”

英文來源：路透社
翻譯&編輯：董靜
審校：yaning