Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and More: An Introduction to Voice Assistants
Top Cited Papers
- 2 January 2018
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis Ltd in Medical Reference Services Quarterly
- Vol. 37 (1), 81-88
- https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2018.1404391
Abstract
Voice assistants are software agents that can interpret human speech and respond via synthesized voices. Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Assistant are the most popular voice assistants and are embedded in smartphones or dedicated home speakers. Users can ask their assistants questions, control home automation devices and media playback via voice, and manage other basic tasks such as email, to-do lists, and calendars with verbal commands. This column will explore the basic workings and common features of today’s voice assistants. It will also discuss some of the privacy and security issues inherent to voice assistants and some potential future uses for these devices. As voice assistants become more widely used, librarians will want to be familiar with their operation and perhaps consider them as a means to deliver library services and materials.Keywords
This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit:
- DolphinAttackPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2017
- Designing a spoken dialogue interface to an intelligent cognitive assistant for people with dementiaHealth Informatics Journal, 2015
- Advances in natural language processingScience, 2015
- Use of Google Translate in medical communication: evaluation of accuracyBMJ, 2014