If you own Amazon Echo, then you must agree that Alexa is a very helpful digital assistant. Whether it is set a reminder, make calls, check weather forecasts, control your home devices or play music to entertain you, Alexa can do it all. What if you want Alexa to follow a command during night time but don’t want any of your family members getting bothered while doing so?
Well, now it is possible. You can talk to Alexa now without disturbing any of your family members. Once you activate “Whispered Responses” on Alexa, you can murmur the commands, she will whisper back at you. This feature will help people with little babies in their homes to communicate with Alexa. This new feature “Whispered Responses” will enhance the experience with the smart speaker and Alexa.
Note: If you have activated whispered response you do not necessarily have to talk in a soft voice all the time. If you talk in the normal or regular tone, it will respond in a similar way. In this post, we have listed the steps to activate whispered response feature on Alexa.
Steps To Enable Whispered Response On Alexa
There are various ways to enable the whispered responses on Alexa to change the regular voice to soft-spoken one. You can just ask Alexa, “Alexa enable whisper mode,” and once it is activated, Alexa will confirm that the Whispered responses is now activated.
The second way to enable the whispered responses and start talking to it in soft tone by altering the whispered responses settings under Alexa app on your smartphone. Follow the steps below to do the same:
Step 1: Launch the Alexa app.
Step 2: Go to the main menu & choose Settings.
Step 3: Choose Alexa Account
Step 4: Choose “Alexa Voice Responses”
Step 5: Activate “Whispered Responses” by toggling the switch to the right side.
How Does It Work?
In order to use whispered responses, a smart speaker should be capable to detect if a person is murmuring or concede what a user is saying and reply in a similar way. As whenever you murmur, you’re not utilizing voice. “Whispered speech is predominantly unvoiced, meaning that it doesn’t involve the vibration of the vocal cords, and it has less energy in lower frequency bands than ordinary speech,” explains Alexa Speech Group Scientist Zeynab Raeesy in an Amazon Alexa Developers Blog.
Whispered Responses uses LSTMs (long short-term memory neural networks), which are utilized in speech recognition. The end pointing process of Alexa is also significant for whispered responses. End-point is used by Alexa to recognize when a user has finished giving a command & anticipate acknowledgment. Silence is also an input which is considered to detect whisper. By inspecting peak on short-term memory neural networks confidence data over frames of a command and making an optimum adaptation. However, the issue was resolved by Alexa speech scientists and now Alexa can comprehend and acknowledge whether it is regular speech or a whisper.
This way, you can activate whispered responses and give a command and get a response from Alexa. Until now, Echo devices execute better in whispered responses than all other devices in the smart home speakers.