Delip Rao, CEO and co-founder of start-up R7 Speech Sciences has brought the issue back into the spotlight that voice recognition systems struggle more with female voices.

Not New

The issue has been known about for some time and has been brought into sharper focus with the popularity of voice-activated digital assistants like Apple’s Siri, or Amazon’s Alexa, or Google Home.

Why?

According to Linguistics experts, the key problem is that females have higher pitched voices than males, and they tend to be quieter and sound more “breathy” when they talk.

With speech for example, Mean Fundamental Frequency (Mean FO) can be expressed as a number around which vocal tones are spread. The FO for men is around 120Hz, but for women it is much higher at 200Hz.

MFCCs

Also, another problem for voice recognition systems comes when they try to process words and sounds into MFCCs (Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients). The voices of women are known to give a less robust acoustic signal, and this signal can be easily masked by noise. These two challenges also make things more difficult for speech recognition systems.

Lack of Diverse Training

Since speech recognition systems also rely on an AI element, they require training to become more used to recognising certain vocal characteristics. Linguistics experts, therefore, also believe that a lack of diverse training examples of the speech of women may also be a contributing factor to the problems encountered by current voice recognition systems.

Gender Biases As A Result

Some commentators are, therefore, predicting possible worsening gender biases problems with voice recognition systems if these issues are not tackled.

Experts have pointed out the importance of training systems using equal proportions of men and women to avoid the problem of them being very good at recognising male data and very bad at recognizing female data.

Ethnic Mix

The same experts have also highlighted potential biases based on ethnicity if voice recognition systems aren’t trained using a wide ethnic as well as gender mix.

What Does This Mean For Your Businesses?

With digital assistants now in the workplace in computer systems (e.g. Alexa for Business),and with AI bots being used e.g. to handle customer service systems (with a voice element), it’s important that women and / or certain ethnic groups are not at a disadvantage when using the systems.

The problem is known about now, and companies should, therefore, be taking action to make sure that voice recognition systems work well for all demographics, and deliver equality as part of their value.

A study by Sage that identified how 83% of clients would like their accountants to extend their services has seen 50% of accountants looking to solutions like AI to allow them to free up the necessary time to do so.

Off-Load Repetitive Tasks To AI

With accountancy clients looking for consultancy and advice (42%) as well as traditional services, half of the 3,000 accountants involved in the Sage study appear to be happy to consider AI and automation technology solutions to handle the workload of repetitive tasks such as number crunching, data entry and diary management.

Likely To Invest

The president of AI at Sage, Kriti Sharma, has been reported as having recognised that although AI is currently viewed as an automation tool by accountants, more are likely to invest in AI in the coming years as an important, lower cost way to scale their operations.

For example, AI could be used to review millions of transactions and spot anomalies, and even make recommendations. This would normally be something that would be done manually. AI could, therefore, significantly decrease costs and make accountants more time-rich, thereby enabling them to develop and sell new services.

Many Industries Adopting AI

Accountancy is certainly not the only industry beginning to realise and unlock the potential of AI. For example:

• Some legal firms are already using AI to assemble, process and read certain types of documents.
• AI ‘cognitive technology’ is being used to answer customer questions for customers in many areas of services.
• In banking e.g. Nat West, AI software is being used to offer consumers an investment advice service. Also, for Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) automated financial advice services have allowed the bank to reduce face-to-face adviser jobs by 220. As far back as 2016, RBS and NatWest introduced their virtual customer service technology in the form of the ‘Luvo’ chatbot from IBM Watson.
• The AI The chatbot, called ‘DoNotPay’ (originally launched in March 2016 by British student, Joshua Browder), made famous for providing legal advice that led to a reported 375,000 claims against parking tickets, was then modified so that it could automatically sue Equifax for $15,000 per claim in the wake of a hack and data breach.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The adaptability and capacity of AI to learn and tackle even complicated tasks (in April last year an AI program beat the world’s leading poker players in a 5-day competition), means that it has huge business potential. Deploying AI e.g. to tackle repetitive tasks and free-up time in accountancy is just another example of how this technology can be used to add value, save costs, help meet changing customer needs, allow the cost-effective scaling of businesses, and improve competitiveness.

Even though AI appears to be advancing at a fast rate, we really haven’t seen anything yet as regards its true potential.

The ‘My People’ feature in Windows 10 provides a handy way for you to access all your favourite contacts from your taskbar using the inbuilt settings and account that is linked with the email that you have used in your Windows.

Here’s how to activate the feature:

1-Check whether your taskbar has the “people” icon there or not.
2-If it’s not there, click on the “Settings” icon on your windows and then select “personalise“.
3-Click on the option taskbar and activate the option “Show contacts on the taskbar“.
4-Click on the people icon on your taskbar, and then click on the option “Get started” to make the ‘my people’ panel appear.
5-Select the apps that you want to integrate with to get the contacts (these apps will be displayed).
6-Once you have selected the account, click on “Find people and add” and then select the people you want to add to your taskbar.
7-You can then add multiple contacts in your taskbar, and also pin and unpin them from the taskbar.

Dropbox has announced that it is now one step closer to delivering a unified home for work by forming a new partnership with Google Cloud that will integrate G-Suite in its cloud storage.

What Was The Problem?

Dropbox had been looking for ways to respond to the need for users to be able to make projects easier to manage, centralise their frequently used files and information, and reduce the time wasted in having to swap between files and bits of work scattered across storage buckets, apps, and devices. The company is also looking for new ways to compete in a crowded cloud storage market.

The new integration that the partnership will deliver to all Dropbox users will mean that they can use Dropbox to create, open, and edit Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides files live. It will also mean that Business Administrators will be able to manage Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides files like any other content that resides in Dropbox.

With a G Suite made accessible, no matter what tools users bring to work, Dropbox and Google customers will be able to better collaborate with their frequently used tools.

Additional Native G Suite Integrations

As well as being able to use Google Docs and files in Dropbox, users will also be able to benefit from additional native G Suite integrations e.g. with Gmail and Hangouts Chat. This could help teams to stay connected with project content and the conversations around it. The Gmail add-on will allow users to display the dates of creation, modification, and last-accessed for linked files, and the Hangouts integration will bring previews for linked files directly to chats.

When Is It Available?

The new Dropbox, Google Cloud and G-Suite integration will be made available to Dropbox customers in the second half of 2018.

One of Many Collaborations For Dropbox

This is one of many collaborations with leading brands for Dropbox in recent times. For example, Dropbox has formed partnerships with Adobe Creative Cloud and its Adobe XD, Microsoft, Apple, and Workplace by Facebook.

Answer To Competition

The latest partnership with Google is another way that Dropbox can fight back against some fierce competition from the likes of Microsoft. For example, Microsoft is reported to have been trying to lure users of cloud services from Box, Dropbox and Alphabet’s Google Drive by giving them its competitive product ‘OneDrive for Business’ for free until their current contract expires. Microsoft will be running the promotional switching offer for the next five months.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

For businesses that collaborate online and need to centralise stored documents, this latest partnership is likely to be good news. The promise of centralised content, secure collaboration, and more effective communication through platforms that are already in popular use for many businesses could bring cost and time savings, reduce wastage and frustration, and could improve competitiveness by simplifying things.

All the collaborations between Dropbox and other leading brands could be particularly beneficial to small businesses that will be able to more easily access files, documents and other types of data they need on a daily basis.

Also, this good news about Dropbox can only be helpful in making some headway in restoring trust and helping customers to forget about the bad news from last September when it was revealed that the usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords of an astonishing 68 million customers, stolen in a hack back in 2012 had re-surfaced in a leak.

If you have produced and stored many files on your computer over time, in multiple folders, it can sometimes be difficult to find the file you need. One way to narrow the search in Windows 10 is to search by date. Here’s how:

1. Choose the folder, drive, or library you want to search.
2. Click in the search box (upper right corner of the File Explorer window).
3. Type datemodified: operator (doesn’t matter if there’s a space after the colon), followed by a date / date range.

The format for the date range can be e.g. a single date in any standard date format, a range of dates e.g. 20/1/2018 .. 20/2/2018, a month or year or both, or a relative term e.g. last week, last month. Alternatively :

1. Click in the search box to bring up the Search Tools tab on the ribbon.
2. Click the Date Modified button.
3. Choose one of the available options.

One helpful feature to look out for in the Windows 10 update this Spring will be ‘Near Share’ whereby nearby Windows 10 devices can share files and URLs with you via Bluetooth.

This feature is similar to Apple’s AirDrop, and it works in the following way:

1. Apps e.g. Photos, Microsoft Edge and File Explorer display a Share icon.
2. Click on the icon to see and chose local devices to share with by Bluetooth.
3. The recipient gets a notification via the Action Centre.
4. Acceptance of the notification by the recipient allows the transfer to take place.

If you help support your business and / or home computer, and you want to keep things secure and tidy by stopping other users from downloading unwanted software from sources you don’t trust onto the computer, here’s how…

To lock down Windows 10 so users can’t install new software unless it comes from a trusted source:

• Go to Settings > Apps > Apps & Features.

Look for the Installing Apps setting at the top of the page. There should be three choices:

1. Allow apps from anywhere (the default).
2. Warn me before installing apps from outside the Windows Store. Selecting this option will mean that any standard user accounts will need your permission to continue.
3. Allow apps from the Store only. Select this option if you don’t want users to be able to install apps from anywhere except the trusted Windows Store.

Desktop programs that you’ve already installed before enabling this restriction will continue to run.

Using these restrictions, you can set up a PC with a selection of trusted apps and then lock it down so nothing changes without your permission.