Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson explains whether robot security guards are better or worse for society. A new study is suggesting that robots with more "charismatic" voices – as opposed to flat, matter-of-fact ones – can help people be more creative. Scientists from Denmark found that students who are given a task by a robot with a voice programmed to be more "engaging" and "inspiring" performed better. These students were also more creative than students who received instructions from an identical robot with a flat voice, according to the findings from researchers in Denmark as published by Frontiers in Communication, a peer-reviewed, open-access science journal. Increasingly, social robots are being used for support in educational settings, as SWNS, the British news service, noted.

Apple's recent flurry of software updates also includes a big upgrade for the living room. The newly released tvOS 16.2 adds a Recognize My Voice feature that customizes Siri searches on the Apple TV 4K and TV HD for up to six family members. Once you've trained the set-top to know who's speaking, you can ask for video recommendations and music without worrying that you'll mess with someone's play history. You can also ask to "switch to my profile" instead of navigating the on-screen switcher. You can also change the Siri language to be different than the one your device shows.

Speech synthesis (Text-to-speech, TTS) is the formation of a speech signal from printed text. In a way, it is the opposite of speech recognition. Speech synthesis is used in medicine, dialogue systems, voice assistants and many other business tasks. As long as we have one speaker, the task of speech synthesis at first glance looks quite clear. When several speakers come into play, the situation becomes somewhat complicated and other tasks come into play; for example, voice cloning and voice conversion, this will be discussed further in the text.

Amazon has quietly added a masculine-sounding voice to Alexa. The voice assistant's feminine speech is in contrast to competitors from both Google and Apple, which each offer the option to choose different voices. It has led to concern over the gendered implications for offering the voice assistant with only a feminine-sounding voice. Now the company has finally added a masculine-sounding voice, which appears to be called "Ziggy". The change came amid a more loudly announced change that added voices such as Shaquille O'Neal, and was first spotted by The Ambient.

Google Home is finally getting a feature that its users have been clamoring for since it launched last year: it can now distinguish between different voices and respond with personalized responses. Until now, you could only connect a single account to a Google Home, and that meant you could only get info about one person's calendar, for example. If you're single or don't have roommates, that's perfectly fine, but the moment you live with somebody else, that's a pretty obvious problem. With today's update, which should be rolling out in the U.S. as you read this (and which is coming to the U.K. in the coming months), up to six people can share a Google Home. So now, when you ask your morning commute, you'll get the info about your route and not your spouse's.

Amazon is reportedly working on a new feature for its Alexa voice assistant that would allow for individual voice recognition, according to a report from Time. In other words, your Echo would theoretically be able to tell voices apart and figure out who is actually talking to it. According to Time, the feature is internally known as "Voice ID" and has been in development since summer 2015. The report claims that Voice ID would allow certain commands to be locked to a specific voice -- for example, only allowing the account holder to purchase things off Amazon (something that's certainly been an issue in the past). Alexa actually already supports multiple user profiles and PIN verification for purchases, but automating the process through voice recognition would certainly make it easier to take advantage of those features.

Today, Amazon announced three new artificial intelligence tools for developers that use Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud division. Drawing on the artificial intelligence that powers Amazon's popular home assistant Alexa, the new tools will allow developers to build apps that have conversational interfaces, can turn text into speech and use computer vision that is capable of recognizing faces and objects. Amazon's latest push follows moves from Google and Microsoft, both of which have cloud computing platforms that already use artificial intelligence. Google's G Suite, for example, uses AI to power Smart Reply in Gmail, instant translation and smart scheduling functions in its calendar. Likewise, Microsoft recently announced it's bringing artificial intelligence to its Office 365 service to add search within Word, provide productivity tracking and build maps from Excel with geographic data.

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