Amazon's Alexa Can't Distinguish A Human Voice, But This Tiny Cambridge Startup Might Teach It How

Audio Analytic's CEO Chris Mitchel smashes window panes with a sledge hammer to help teach machines how to hear the sound of breaking glass as well as humans. Amazon's Echo speaker knows that you only have to say "Alexa" to wake it up. But technically it can't tell the difference between two people murmuring in the corner of the room and the sound of radio static. That would take a deeper dive into the building blocks of sound itself. But one small startup in Cambridge, UK has spent ten years building up an entirely new language of sound which, for the first time, will allow machines to recognize the sound of human speech.