How Alice, Intelligent Assistant, Learned to Understand People with Speech Impairments

Discover how Yandex's virtual assistant Alice was enhanced to better understand people with speech impairments in this 24-minute conference talk from DSC EUROPE 24 in Belgrade. Anastasia Shapedko details the significant July 2024 upgrade powered by the YandexGPT neural network, which improved voice recognition capabilities for individuals with stuttering, cerebral palsy, stroke, and trauma. Learn about the extensive training process involving hundreds of thousands of audio recordings from people with speech impairments, resulting in a 20% reduction in the accuracy gap between recognizing standard speech and impaired speech. This advancement makes the intelligent assistant more accessible and responsive to a wider range of users with diverse speech patterns.