Whispering to the Echo
I’ve started to use whisper mode with the Echo Show at night and… I like it a lot . I can imagine that building this was no easy fete. Lots of work likely needed to be done in making whisper mode be able to pick up the Alexa wake word and then a whole new speech recognition model needs to be built around whispered pronunciations.
What’s interesting is that listening to the recordings (Alexa App > Settings > Alexa Account > History), whispered utterances sound much clearer than regular ones. Maybe this is because they’re usually spoken much closer to the device.
Also, combined with brief responses, the experience is a very good one. “Alexa, set bathroom lights to 5%” (very quiet chime).
Let’s hope Google can catch up with this feature as whisper mode is a great use case that makes a voice first device stickier.
