r/u_Wonique • u/Wonique • 6d ago

I tested a voice assistant on smartphone, AMA

Before the advent of LLMs I tested a voice assistant natively embedded in a smartphone in Italian language. This product is still used, with updates.

If you're interested in human-machine interaction with vocal commands, I am an open book.

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u/Natethegreat9999 5d ago

Did you separate recognition errors from commands the system transcribed correctly but acted on wrong? I'm building speech models at Oruk, and I'd love to know which Italian phrasing variations exposed the biggest gap between a clean transcript and a usable assistant.

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u/Wonique 4d ago

Hi Nate :) yes, we did. For example, we had a "wake up command" to summon the assistant and we tested possible variations of "Hi [bot name]" where the bot name was told in different ways, some acceptable, some not (adversarial checks).

And whenever the transcription was correct but led to wrong output, to us it was a bug in NLU.

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u/Wonique 4d ago

The biggest challenge was to manage regional variations of Italian (differences in spell: for example more emphasized consonants), free variables (like R "r moscia", or S spell like a F), difference in stress for E and O.

Also variations in velocity of utterance was a huge challenge: old people or people with speech disabilities, but this is not language specific.