Mozilla’s Open Source Voice Recognition Tool Nears Human-like Accuracy

Did you hear that? That’s the sound of the playing field being leveled. Big time. Thanks to Mozilla’s collecting over 500 hours of speech, anyone can now access this vast library training for Voice. Obviously this is still not as much as Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, but the fact that they’ve already reach a per-word error rate of about 6.5% is pretty damn impressive (especially as compared to Microsoft’s 5.5%). What will *you* do with this?

Get Started with Customer Chat

Aaaaand it’s happened. Facebook Messenger’s Web Widget is out for all. Exciting stuff! Customers can now have their B2C conversations follow them from Messenger to brand.com (obviously already possible with other web widget solutions, but now without the clunkiness of authentication). Will be very interesting to see what ripples this creates from a business model standpoint for folks like Intercom. Feel free to ping us at Hello@Reply.ai if you have more questions about implementing this on your website!

Alexa Developers Can Now Use Notifications, Soon Personalize Apps Based on Users’ Voices

With Alexa at 68-76% market share (depending on your source), developers are sitting up and taking notice of updates to where the limits are to build an Alexa Skill. Interesting to see that these new notifications capabilities are both audio and visual, employing Alexa’s lights as visual cues depending on the alert. We can think of a few ways to use this new feature for our Morton’s Salt Brining Assistant we made on Alexa

​Samsung buys Korean AI startup Fluenty | ZDNet

Another acquisition. This time very clearly another piece in Samsung’s Virtual Assistant puzzle. Interesting to be able to so clearly see the strategic steps this giant is taking towards supporting and ultimately assimilating AI across its entire organization. From the consolidation of its AI research teams, Viv acquisition last year, and the continued roll-out of Bixby. We’re most excited about how this will manifest across it’s other non-mobile devices. Bixby, how do I set up this TV?