It seems Sonos is gearing up to roll out its own long-rumored voice assistant in the coming weeks. Sonos Voice is said to offer voice control for music playback on many of the company's devices, offering owners another option if they'd rather not use Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Sonos will first roll out Sonos Voice in the US on June 1st as part of a software update, according to The Verge. The feature should arrive in other countries later. A rumored $250 soundbar called Sonos Ray will likely be among those.

Out of the box, modern Sonos speakers support Alexa and Google Assistant, and in a roundabout way Siri as well. Between those options, you might think Sonos would be covered when it comes to voice-activated assistants, but the company may be working on a solution of its own. In a customer survey spotted by VoiceBot.ai Additionally, the company states the potential voice assistant would process requests locally, claiming that's something that would allow it work faster. It also points to the privacy benefits of such a setup.

Even before beginning to code, we need to have an "intents.json" This JSON file is accessed by the Voice Assistant and the response accordingly. Let's start coding by importing all the required libraries After importing all the required modules, we need to create an instance of the speaker and the recognizer so that the assistant can capture what we humans say and convert it into textual form and, the remaining code is explained by comments within the program. A list named "todo_list" is created to work on the list that the assistant maintains for us. Now, let's begin coding functions for each of the required tasks.

The last 10 years have utterly transformed how people think about voice technology. From limited uses in just a few outlets, voice assistants are now integrating into every part of people's lives. To encapsulate everything that has happened in ten years, we've picked a notable event from each year of the last decade to highlight and show how they marked a milestone in the way voice assistants have evolved and spread. Siri began life as an independent voice assistant, a mobile app for iPhones. Apple saw potential in Siri and snapped up the company and its creation in 2010.

Following the rollout of its cloudless, edge device-focused voice assistant stack, which comprises wake word, speech-to-text translation, and speech-to-intent capabilities, Picovoice announced a web console that lets you easily create and train your own voice models. Alongside the web console release, the company joined the Arm AI Ecosystem Partner Program, which gives Picovoice deeper access to ARM IP and to chip manufacturers like NXP. Specifically, Picovoice is focused on ARM Cortex-M chip designs, which are extremely low power and can integrate into all manner of IoT devices -- but are powerful enough to support its voice assistant without the need for a cloud connection. The big idea is that OEMs can use the Picovoice web console to whip up voice controls for their devices large and small, for minimal cost. Products with voice assistants on board are hot, and although the likes of smart speakers and smart displays get the bulk of the attention, some level of voice control is possible on all manner of lower-power edge devices, from coffee makers to lights.

Spotify is experimenting with a voice-control interface, looking to free itself from reliance on Siri and Alexa and pave the way for the company's forthcoming smart speaker. Users of the service have spotted the new feature hiding in the search bar of Spotify's iOS app. After tapping the magnifying glass to search for a track or playlist, testers see a microphone icon inside a white bubble, according to the Verge. After users tap on the icon, Spotify suggests a number of typical requests for a voice-controlled music system: "Show Calvin Harris", "Play my Discover Weekly" and "Play some upbeat pop", for instance. The move comes as Spotify ramps up its efforts to build a smart speaker to challenge Apple, Amazon and Google in the hardware field, all of which have their own music services. A trio of job adverts posted in February confirmed the company's intentions, with Spotify elaborating on its goals to build a "category defining" product "akin to Pebble Watch, Amazon Echo and Snap Spectacles".

French startup Snips is now helping you build a custom voice assistant for your device. Snips doesn't use Amazon's Alexa Voice Service or Google Assistant SDK -- the company is building its own voice assistant so that you can embed it on your devices. And the best part is that it doesn't send anything to the cloud as it works offline. If you want to understand how a voice assistant works, you can split it into multiple parts. First, it starts with a wakeword.

Monster's latest team-up isn't with another star athlete or fellow accessory-maker: it's with music platform Speak Music Inc., which is lending the company its voice assistant named Melody. Monster says the partnership will add voice control to some of its headphones, making them the "world's first voice-powered premium" cans. The premium part may be true, but there are other voice-activated Bluetooth headsets out there. There's also bound to be more, considering manufacturers can now incorporate Amazon's Alexa Voice Service into their products. World's first or not, Melody adds a new level of hands-free convenience to Monster's devices.

In the voice assistant market, Apple has Siri, Google has Google Assistant, Microsoft has Cortana. There are also voice assistants that aren't natively integrated into phones or computers, such as SoundHound's Hound and Amazon's Alexa. We have also heard that Samsung is planning their own voice assistant called "Bixby". This is why it doesn't really come as a complete surprise to learn that Huawei could be working on their own voice assistant platform as well. This comes from a report from Bloomberg in which people familiar with the matter told the publication about Huawei's plans.

Last year, Huawei leapfrogged a couple of fellow Chinese hardware companies to secure its spot as the third largest smartphone maker worldwide. As the company takes aim at the number two spot, it's apparently working to differentiate itself even more from the competition by developing more proprietary tech, adding to a list of components that already includes its own in-house chips. According to a new report from Bloomberg, a smart assistant is the next step. The company is said to be hard at work on a Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant competitor, employing a team of more than 100 people tasked with its creation in Shenzhen. If true, the company would join Samsung in a growing list of Android handset makers opting not to go with Google's assistant – though the Galaxy maker sped up the process a bit with its recent acquisition of Viv Labs.