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 Incs Google all offering electronic assistants to take your commands.随着谷歌公司上周全面发售谷歌助手服务，苹果、亚马逊、微软公司以及谷歌都发售了拒绝接受人类指令的语音助手服务，一场语音助手战已全面打响。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是这些服务中的老前辈。许多研究人员，还包括坐落于西雅图的艾伦人工智能研究所的首席执行官奥伦?埃齐奥尼在内，都指出在语音辨识和问问题方面，苹果的领先优势已消耗只剩。

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.不过，最少有一件事是Siri可以但其竞争对手做到将近的，即不会说道36个国家的21种语言。这个功能在智能手机市场至关重要，因为大部分智能手机都是销往美国以外的地区的。Microsoft Cortana, by contrast, has eight languages tailored for 13 countries. Googles Assistant, which began in its Pixel phone but has moved to other Android devices, speaks four languages. Amazons Alexa features only English and German. Siri will even soon start to learn Shanghainese, a special dialect of Wu Chinese spoken only around Shanghai.微软公司“小娜”为13个国家自定义了8种语言。

谷歌语音助手不会说道4种语言，该服务一开始只在谷歌自家的Pixel手机里有，后来又应用于到其他安卓设备。亚马逊的Alexa只不会说道英语和德语。而Siri甚至立刻要开始学说上海话了，这是一种只在上海及其周边地区用于的吴语方言。

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.这解释，智能助手要想要沦为无所不在的智能手机和其他设备操纵工具，就必需横跨语言的障碍。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.微软公司一个29人的编辑团队于是以著手发售面向地方市场的自定义“小娜”服务。谷歌和亚马逊都回应计划给它们的语音助手加到更加多种语言，但两家公司皆拒绝接受透漏更加多消息。

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.苹果语音团队负责人亚历克斯?阿赛罗说道，当公司研发人员开始教Siri一门新的语言时，不会让真人用各种方言和口音来读者文本段落，然后再行手动mRNA，这样计算机就可以享有精确自学样本。苹果还不会从有所不同的声音中捕猎各种语音。然后，苹果不会创建起一个声学模型，并通过这个模型开始尝试预测字符序列。

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.苹果随后不会在新的语言中部署“问答模式”，这是一种文本和语音之间的翻译器。当用户用于问答模式时，苹果不会捕捉音频录音中的一小部分，然后对其电子邮件处置。由于这些录音有背景噪音以及模糊不清的词语，将不会由专人mRNA，这一过程可以将语音辨识的错误率减少一半。

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.阿赛罗说道，在搜集了充足的数据，并让配音员为Siri录音了新的语言之后，Siri就不会向公众对外开放，刚刚公布时Siri需要问苹果指出最少见的问题。公布之后，Siri将不会从用户的实际问题中自学，并且不会每两周改版一次，做出一些调整。But script-writing does not scale, said Charles Jolley, creator of an intelligent assistant named Ozlo. “You cant hire enough writers to come up with the system youd need in every language. You have to synthesize the answers,” he said. That is years off, he said.不过，智能助理Ozlo的创始人查尔斯?乔利回应，编写脚本无法做规模化，“你不有可能聘用充足多的作者为每一种语言编写必须的脚本，你必需人工合成答案。”他指出，这还必须多年的时间。

The founders of Viv, a startup founded by Siris original creators that Samsung acquired last year, is working on just that.三星去年并购了“Siri之父”创立的人工智能公司Viv，这家初创公司的创始人正在著手解决问题这个问题。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 todays limited functionality versions is to open the system up and let the world teach them.Viv的牵头创始人兼任CEO戴格?吉特拉斯说道：“Viv目的专攻智能助理的规模化问题，要想要穿过目前版本的功能局限，唯一的方法就是开放系统，让世界来教它们。

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