In October 2018, months after a brief reveal, Amazon brought Whisper Mode to select third- and first-party Alexa devices. It expanded the feature to all locales in November 2019, such that all smart home appliances powered by Alexa -- the company's virtual assistant -- now respond to whispered speech by whispering back. Amazon was a bit light on the technical details initially, save that Whisper Mode uses a neural network -- layers of mathematical functions loosely modeled after the human brain's neurons -- to distinguish among normal and whispered words. But in an academic paper appearing in the January 2020 issue of the journal IEEE Signal Processing Letters and an accompanying blog post, it detailed the research that led to the expansion. The principal challenge was converting normal speech into whispered speech while maintaining naturalness and speaker identity, explained Marius Cotescu, an applied scientist in Amazon's text-to-speech research group.

Amazon's Echo voice assistants have gone from expensive parlor trick of a gadget to the perfect stocking stuffer, so you probably weren't surprised to see one of these smart home speakers wrapped up with your name on it. Well, maybe be a little surprised. The Echo is a perfect first step or addition to a smart home, and taking advantage of some of its lesser-known features could take you from smart home skeptic to convert faster than you think. Thankfully if you have a friend or family member with a name that sounds anything like "Alexa," you can change the "wake word" that activates your new voice assistant. Download the Alexa app to your smartphone, then navigate to the Devices tab.

Alexa is about to get a lot smarter - and quieter. A new'Whisper Mode' has launched, allowing Amazon's smart speaker to keep the volume down when needed. It allows the Echo smart speakers to intelligently reduce the voice assistant's volume when you whisper a command to it. It comes in response to complaints from customers that Alexa wakes up their partners, children and pets. The update allows the Echo smart speakers to intelligently reduce the voice assistant's volume when you whisper a command to it Open the Alexa app on your mobile device, then go to Settings Alexa Account Alexa Voice Responses Whispered Responses.

One of the new features introduced at last month's Amazon hardware event was the ability to whisper to your Amazon Echo device -- and have Alexa whisper back to you. Amazon confirmed to Engadget that this feature, called "whisper mode," is now rolling out to US users. Whisper mode will likely be most useful around children, whether it's to get the kids in the mindset that it's bedtime and they should be quiet, or to avoid waking a sleeping child. The idea behind this feature is training Alexa to recognize conversational cues. For example, if you were having a conversation with someone and lowered your voice to a whisper, the person would naturally respond in-kind.