Whisper to Alexa, and She'll Whisper Back : Alexa Blogs

If you're in a room where a child has just fallen asleep, and someone else walks in, you might start speaking in a whisper, to indicate that you're trying to keep the room quiet. The other person will probably start whispering, too. We would like Alexa to react to conversational cues in just such a natural, intuitive way, and toward that end, Amazon last week announced Alexa's new whisper mode, which will let Alexa-enabled devices respond to whispered speech by whispering back. At the IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, in December, my colleagues and I will present a paper that describes the techniques we used to enable whisper mode. The ultimate implementation differs somewhat, but the basic principles are the same.