Technology

Amazon has applied for a patent for an audio system that detects the accent of a speaker and changes it to the accent of the listener, perhaps helping eliminate communication barriers in many situations and industries. The patent doesn&t mean the company has made it (or necessarily that it will be granted), but therealso no technical reason why it can&t do so.

The application, spotted by Patent Yogi, describes &techniques for accent translation.& Although couched in the requisite patent-ese, the method is quite clear. After a little translation of my own, herewhat it says:

In a two-party conversation, received audio is analyzed to see if it matches with one of a variety of stored accents. If so, the input audio from each party is outputted based on the accent of the other party.

Itkind of a no-brainer, especially considering all the work thatbeing done right now in natural language processing. Accents can be difficult to understand, especially if you haven&t spoken with an individual before, and especially without the critical cues from facial and body movements that make in-person communication so much more effective.

The most obvious place for an accent translator to be deployed is in support, where millions of phone calls take place regularly between people in distant countries. Itthe support persongoal to communicate clearly and avoid adding to the callerworries with language barriers. Accent management is a major part of these industries; support personnel are often required to pass language and accent tests in order to advance in the organization for which they work.

A computational accent remover would not just improve their lot, but make them far more effective. Now a person with an Arabic accent can communicate just as well with just about anyone who speaks the same language — no worries if the person on the other end has heavily Austrian, Russian or Korean-accented English; if itEnglish, it should work.

There are of course lots of other situations where this could be helpful — while traveling, for instance, or conducting international business. I&m sure you can think of a few situations of your own from the last few months or years where an accent reducer or translator would have been handy.

As for the actual execution of this system, thata big unknown. But Amazon has a huge amount of money and engineering talent dedicated to natural language processing, and therenothing about this system that strikes me as unrealistic or unattainable with existing technology.

It would be a machine learning model, of course, or rather a set of them, each trained on several hours of speech by people with a specific accent. Good thing Alexa has a worldwide presence! Amazon has an avalanche of audio samples coming in from Echoes and other devices all over the place, so many accents are likely already accounted for in their library. From there itjust a matter of soliciting voice recordings from any group thatunderrepresented in that data set.

Research along these lines has certainly been done already, but Amazon seems to have the jump on others on the creation of a specific system for using that knowledge in product form.

Notably the patent allows for a bit of cheating on the systempart: it doesn&t have to scramble during the first few seconds to identify your accent, but can stack the deck a bit by checking the devicelocation, phone number, previous accents encountered on that line or, of course, simply allowing the speaker to pick their accent manually. Of course there will still be a variety within, say, a selected accent of &Pakistani,& but with enough data the system should be able to detect and accommodate those as well.

As always with patents thereno guarantee this will actually take product form; it could just be research or a &defensive& patent intended to prevent rivals from creating a system like this in the meantime. But in this case I feel confident that therea real possibility a product will ship in the next year or so.

Amazon Rapids, the chat fiction that encourages kids to read by presenting stories in the form of text message conversations, is now going free. Previously, Amazon had been charging $2.99 per month for a subscription that allows unlimited access to its story collection, which now numbers in the hundreds.

First launched in November 2016, Amazon Rapids was meant to capitalize on kids& interest in chat fiction apps like Hooked, Yarn, Tap and others, which tend to cater to a slightly older teenage crowd. Amazon Rapids, meanwhile, was the schoolager-appropriate version, without the swearing, alcohol, sex and yeah, even incest references you&ll find in the Hooked app, for example. (Yuck. Delete.)

Instead, Amazon Rapids& stories are aimed at kids ages 5 to 12 and generally just silly and fun. They&re not meant to addict kids through the use of cliffhangers and timeouts, nor are they scary.

Some of the appstories also serve as crossovers thathelped promote Amazonkids& TV shows, like&Danger - Eggs,& and &Niko and the Sword of Light.& These were authored by the shows& writers, allowing them to extend the showuniverse in a natural way.

In addition, the app included educational features like a built-in glossary and a read-along mode to help younger readers.

However, the app wasn&t heavily marketed by Amazon, and many parents don&t even know it exists, it seems.

According to data from Sensor Tower, Amazon Rapids has been installed only around 120,000+ times to date, three-quarters of which are on iOS. (Subscription revenue goes through Amazon, not the app stores, so the firm doesn&t have a figure for that.)

Amazon Rapids is ranked pretty low on the App Store, at No. 1105 for iPhone downloads in the Education category, and No. 1001 on iPad. The highest it ever reached was No. 65 on iPad.

Oddly, it chose not to compete in the &Books& category, where the other chat fiction apps reside, as do the other non-traditional &book& apps, like Wattpadcrowd-sourced fiction app, Audibleaudiobooks app, various comics apps, and others.

Amazon now says that the hundreds of stories in Rapids will be free going forward. Families can also listen to some of these stories through the Storytime Alexa skill, launched last summer, which includes stories from Amazon Rapids, along with others.

Given Amazon Rapids& small user base, itclear that Amazon no longer believes it makes sense to try to sell subscriptions, and likely now sees its database of stories as more of a value-add for Alexa owners.

That said, itunclear what this means for Rapids& future development and story catalog, which may not continue to grow. (We&ve asked Amazon if it plans to keep adding content to Rapids, and will update if the company responds.)

Arm, the semiconductor firm you probably still remember as ARM, today announced that it has acquired Treasure Data, a data management platform for large enterprise customers. The companies didn&t announce the financial details of the transaction, but earlier reporting by Bloomberg pegged the price at $600 million.

This move strengthens ArmIoTnascent play, given that Treasure Dataspecialty is dealing with the large streams of data that these systems produce (as well as data from CRM, e-commerce systems and other third-party services).

This move follows Armrecent acquisition of Stream and indeed, the company calls the acquisition of Treasure Data &the final piece& of its &IoT enablement puzzle.& The result of this completed puzzle is the Arm Pelion IoT Platform, which combines Stream, TreasureData and the existing Arm Mbed Cloud into a single solution for connecting and managing IoT devices and the data they produce.

Arm says Treasure Data will continue to operate as before and continue to serve new clients as well as its existing users. &It will remain an important part of industry IoT enablement, providing the ability to harness new, complex edge and device data within a comprehensive customer profile to personalize their products and improve their experiences,& the company says.