Academic literature on the topic 'Intelligent Voice Assistant'

Intelligent cognitive assistants support people who need help performing everyday tasks by detecting when problems occur and providing tailored and context-sensitive assistance. Spoken dialogue interfaces allow users to interact with intelligent cognitive assistants while focusing on the task at hand. In order to establish requirements for voice interfaces to intelligent cognitive assistants, we conducted three focus groups with people with dementia, carers, and older people without a diagnosis of dementia. Analysis of the focus group data showed that voice and interaction style should be chosen based on the preferences of the user, not those of the carer. For people with dementia, the intelligent cognitive assistant should act like a patient, encouraging guide, while for older people without dementia, assistance should be to the point and not patronising. The intelligent cognitive assistant should be able to adapt to cognitive decline.

Background: As the use of intelligent voice assistant applications becomes more prevalent, a growing body of studies are examining individuals' interactions with intelligent voice assistants. However, very limited research has focused on comparing the antecedents of both use and non-use behaviour of individuals, based on the technology acceptance models. To fill this gap, the present study investigated antecedents of intelligent voice assistance use and use intention in a cross-sectional setting. Additionally, to go one step beyond the existing literature on technology acceptance models and theories, a new construct termed perceived needs, as well as the moderating role of perceived privacy concerns and perceived awareness, are introduced. Method: A quantitative, cross-sectional research design was utilised using a nonprobability sampling strategy through the online networking platforms. Total of 277 (n = 155 users vs n = 122 non-users) international adults age between 20-74 years (79.6% female, 20.4 % male) contributed to the study. Ordinary least squares (OLS) linear regression and Bivariate logistic regression analyses for non-users and users were conducted, respectively. Results: Both analyses revealed that peer influence and perceived needs related to the intention to use intelligent voice assistants for non-users, which applied to the current intelligent voice assistance users where privacy concerns were considered. Surprisingly, the key determinants of technology acceptance and use theories, such as perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness, did not hold for intelligent voice assistance usage. Conclusion: The current research contributed to the field by validating new constructs of perceived needs and the moderation role of perceived privacy concerns. However, in order to build on an existing body of knowledge, future studies should further examine the moderation role of perceived privacy concerns, perceived ease of use, and perceived usefulness in the same domain.

In the coming future, virtual assistants will automate nearly all of the manual and time-consuming tasks. This project is an implementation of an intelligent voice assistant for Windows which includes the functionality of security through facial recognition. Until this day, there has not been any good alternative for Windows, so this project aims to implement a voice assistant for the Windows platform while describing the difficulties and challenges that lies in this task.

Humans are living in an era where they are interacting with machines day in and day out. In this new era of the 21st century, a virtual assistant (IVA) is a boon for everyone. It has opened the way for a new world where devices can interact their own. The human voice is integrated with every device making it intelligent. These IVAs can also be used to integrate it with business intelligence software such as Tableau and PowerBI to give dashboards the power of voice and text insights using NLG (natural language generation). This new technology attracted almost the entire world like smart phones, laptops, computers, smart meeting rooms, car InfoTech system, TV, etc. in many ways. Some of the popular voice assistants are like Mibot, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, Bixby, and Amazon Alexa. Voice recognition, contextual understanding, and human interaction are some of the issues that are continuously improving in these IVAs and shifting this paradigm towards AI research. This research aims at processing human natural voice and gives a meaningful response to the user. The questions that it is not able to answer are stored in a database for further investigation.

Natural user interfaces are becoming popular. One of the most common natural user interfaces nowadays are voice activated interfaces, particularly smart personal assistants such as Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana, and Siri. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of these four smart personal assistants in two dimensions: the correctness of their answers and how natural the responses feel to users. Ninety-two participants conducted the evaluation. Results show that Alexa and Google Assistant are significantly better than Siri and Cortana. However, there is no statistically significant difference between Alexa and Google Assistant.

Background The world’s aging population is increasing, with an expected increase in the prevalence of Alzheimer disease and related dementias (ADRD). Proper nutrition and good eating behavior show promise for preventing and slowing the progression of ADRD and consequently improving patients with ADRD’s health status and quality of life. Most ADRD care is provided by informal caregivers, so assisting caregivers to manage patients with ADRD’s diet is important. Objective This study aims to design, develop, and test an artificial intelligence–powered voice assistant to help informal caregivers manage the daily diet of patients with ADRD and learn food and nutrition-related knowledge. Methods The voice assistant is being implemented in several steps: construction of a comprehensive knowledge base with ontologies that define ADRD diet care and user profiles, and is extended with external knowledge graphs; management of conversation between users and the voice assistant; personalized ADRD diet services provided through a semantics-based knowledge graph search and reasoning engine; and system evaluation in use cases with additional qualitative evaluations. Results A prototype voice assistant was evaluated in the lab using various use cases. Preliminary qualitative test results demonstrate reasonable rates of dialogue success and recommendation correctness. Conclusions The voice assistant provides a natural, interactive interface for users, and it does not require the user to have a technical background, which may facilitate senior caregivers’ use in their daily care tasks. This study suggests the feasibility of using the intelligent voice assistant to help caregivers manage patients with ADRD’s diet.

Traffic congestion is a serious issue for large cities. This is especially critical for cities that has insufficient mass transit system like Bangkok. Although transportation infrastructure projects and rail mass transit lines are being implemented, these efforts require major financial investment and take a long time to complete. This work proposes to help reduce traffic problems through influencing a change in driver behavior. In this initial stage, a model for an intelligent persuasive driver assistant is conceptualized as a voice-interactive smart assistant on a smartphone. The system uses information about the driver, his physical state, vehicle performance information, and geolocation information to form persuasive strategies to influence driver behavior and to adapt user interfaces and interactions to reduce driver distraction. Integrating these components together is expected to provide improved assistance in driving tasks and affect driving behavior changes. Keywords: intelligent driver assistant, navigation, smart assistant, persuasive technology

Artificial Intelligent is widely used when it comes to everyday life. Computer science explains AI research as a study of brilliant agents. Every In almost any direction one turns to today, some computer-based information processing technology intervention, whether by a person knowingly or not. Artificial Intelligence has already changed our way of life. A device that we can see in its nature and take action increases its chances of success goals. Input to the recommendations algorithm can be a file for user database and items, and careless removal will be recommendations. User to install in the system by voice or text. This paper presents a new approach to it. All over the world, many people use the assistant. This paper introduces visual applications an assistant that helps to give humanity a chance at various domains. This paper also describes the annoyance of using visual assistant technology.

This project includes an implementation of an intelligent voice recognition assistant for Android where functionality on current existing applications on other platforms is compared. Until this day, there has not been any good alternative for Android, so this project aims to implement a voice assistant for the Android platform while describing the difficulties and challenges that lies in this task.

The largest software companies in the world are racing to develop their Intelligent Personal Assistants. Each with more and more capabilities and ways for users to access them. The different assistants have different capabilities and one of the ways the companies are differentiating is in the interaction techniques their assistants that are controlled with, most uses voice, and some uses text. This thesis walks through these interaction techniques, give a brief overview of intelligent personal assistants today and explores how learnability differentiate when using these interaction techniques. The thesis also investigates when users have access to multiple interaction techniques to use in combination when interacting with such an assistant. To evaluate the field, a literature study was conducted covering Intelligent Personal Assistants, interaction techniques, conversational user interfaces, modalities, multimodal interaction, voice and chat interfaces. Interviews with early adopters of Intelligent Personal Assistants was performed to better understand the current state of the technology and how users were using it. To evaluate the learnability differences in different interaction techniques, a series of user tests in a wizard-of-oz setup was conducted. In the user tests the different groups was using different interaction techniques to interact with their assistants. The main findings of the user tests was that there are indications to that the type of language used differs depending on the interaction techniques. Users who interact through voice is more prone to use a more natural language, while users using a chat interface quickly started to treat the interactions with the Intelligent Personal Assistant as commands. The result observed was that users who interacted with the assistant using chat and then switched to interacting through voice used a shorter, more command-like language when they interacted through voice as well.

This thesis sets out to explore possible applications of speech recognition in construction equipment and autonomous machines. Advancements in autonomous vehicle technology mean that soon, vehicles like wheel loaders will be able perform tasks without human operators. Those vehicles still require a method of interaction with humans and recent improvements in speech recognition mean that it is possible for a natural voice-based interface to be used. The research question of this thesis is the extent to which voice control can replace hand-operated controls in an intelligent autonomous machine. Interviews and observation sessions took place in order to identify the requirements such a speech interface would have to fulfill. Next, a design process took place in order to build a prototype of such system, followed by test sessions to evaluate it. The prototype demonstrated positive attributes, with great learnability and ease of operation, but speech recognition errors meant low performance, and overall user satisfaction.
Detta examensarbete ämnar utforska möjliga tillämpningar av taligenkänning i byggutrustning samt självstyrande fordon. Framsteg i självstyrande fordonsteknologi visar att fordon som hjullastare kommer kunna utföra uppgifter själv, utan operatörer, inom kort framtid. I nuläget krävs ännu människor för att interagera med maskinen. Men nya framsteg i röststyrning visar att röstbaserade gränssnitt kan tillämpas. Forskningsfrågan i detta arbete är: Till vilken utsträckning kan röststyrning ersätta handmanövrerade instrument i ett intelligent självstyrt fordon? En etnografisk forskning ägde rum för att identifiera de krav som ett sådant gränssnitt skulle behöva uppfylla. En designprocess ägde rum för att utveckla en prototyp för ett sådant system. Prototypen utvärderades genom tester och påvisade positiva egenskaper. Den visade sig vara både lätt att lära samt enkel vid användning. Teknologin i taligenkänning påvisade dock brister genom dålig prestanda samt låg användarnöjdhet.

Modern teknik som intelligenta personliga assistenter (IPA) som finns i smartphones kan förenkla människors vardagliga liv. De kan hjälpa personer med funktionshinder och människor som lever stressfulla liv. Genom tal, kan IPA:er enkelt hjälpa personer som ofta har händerna fulla att hitta vägbeskrivningar, information eller skicka meddelanden över hela världen. För att locka människor till att förlita sig på IPA:er i det dagliga livet räcker det inte att den är intelligent och tilltalande, den måste också vara tillförlitlig. Det finns många faktorer som är involverade i att bygga ett trovärdigt system. Denna uppsats fokuserar på att ta reda på vilka egenskaper som gör en IPA:s röst trovärdig och vilken typ av röster designers bör göra tillgängliga för sina användare. Kvalitativa och kvantitativa forskningsmetoder har använts i studien. Sammanlagt 11 semi-strukturerade intervjuer genomfördes och varje innehöll ett kort användartest. 100 personer deltog i en enkätundersökning med ljudklipp och specifika frågor om egenskaper hos pålitliga IPA röster. 70 av 100 tillfrågade var överens om att röster som medför känslor, speciellt en känsla av trygghet och lugn, gör en IPA-röst trovärdig. Att låta tydlig, behaglig, människoliknande och erfaren, samt att ha en dialekt som användaren kan relatera till anses också vara viktiga röstegenskaper. Kön anses vara den minst viktiga.
Modern technologies such as intelligent personal assistants (IPA) found in smartphones can simplify the daily lives of people. They are not only useful for people with disabilities but also for those who live stressful lives. Through speech, IPAs can easily help a busy full-handed person find directions, information or send messages across the world. To entice people into relying on IPAs in their daily life, it not only has to be intelligent or appealing enough but also trustworthy. There are many principles involved in building a trustworthy system. This paper focuses on finding out what characteristics make an IPA-voice trustworthy and what kind of voices designers should make available for their users. Qualitative and quantitative research methods were used in the study. A total of 11 semi-structured interviews were carried out each in conjunction with a brief user test. 100 people participated in a survey with audio clips and specific questions regarding characteristics of trustworthy IPA-voices. 70 of 100 respondents agreed that voices that bring about emotions, particularly the feeling of security and tranquility, make an IPA-voice trustworthy. To sound clear, pleasant, human-like and experienced, and have a dialect that the user can relate to are also considered important voice qualities. Gender is considered the least important.

Conversational interfaces (CIs) have been a trending topic in recent years. As of the last decade, CIs have emerged with the aim of simplifying human-machine interactions and found a wide use case in the market. For example, Siri and Google Assistant are some of the most well-known CIs developed by the tech giants Apple and Google. The digital landscape has evolved from web, to mobile apps, to recently CIs. Nowadays, CIs, in particular chatbots and voicebots, are becoming increasingly common. Whether navigating the web or messaging on a phone, it is likely that CIs have been confronted offering the user help.However, CIs have not managed to reach a large-scale use. Furthermore, the reasons regarding the challenges faced by CIs as well as their usability are not greatly explored. In this thesis, we explore the most relevant uses of CIs and the reasons hindering a widespread use of CIs. Our goal is to provide an insight into CIs’ uses and list the reasons regarding the challenges faced by CIs. The research study followed a mixed method approach connecting an explorative qualitative literature study, a survey and an interview. The data was collected by using a systematic mapping approach for it being more suitable for conducting an effective literature review. The survey and the interview were conducted in order to confirm the findings.According to our research, it was found that the most common use cases of CIs were in customer service, sales, travel and bookings, education, healthcare and as voice assistants. The most prominent challenges faced by CIs were poor usability, language processing and understanding, speech recognition and natural language generation and security and privacy. As a conclusion, the future looks promising for CIs, however, they need to be furher researched and developed in order to help them reach a widespread use in the future.
Konversation Gränssnitt (CIs) har varit ett trendande ämne de senaste åren. Sedan det senaste decenniet har CIs kommit fram i syfte att förenkla interaktioner mellan människor och maskiner och har hittat ett brett användningsfall på marknaden. Det digitala landskapet har utvecklats från webb, till mobila appar till nyligen CI. Numera blir CIs, i synnerhet chatbots och voicebots, allt vanligare. Vare sig du navigerar på webben eller meddelanden i en telefon, är det troligt att CIs har konfronterats med att erbjuda användaren hjälp.CIs har dock inte lyckats uppnå storskalig användning. Dessutom är orsakerna till de utmaningar som CIs står inför och deras användbarhet inte utforskas i hög grad. I den här avhandlingen undersöker vi de mest relevanta användningarna av CIs och orsakerna till en utbredd användning av CIs. Vårt mål är att ge en inblick i CI: s användningar och lista orsakerna till de utmaningar som CIs står inför. Forskningsstudien följde en blandad metodstrategi som ansluter en utforskande kvalitativ litteraturstudie, en undersökning och en intervju. Uppgifterna samlades in med hjälp av en systematisk kartläggningsätt för att göra dem mer lämpliga för att genomföra en effektiv litteraturgranskning. Undersökningen och intervjun genomfördes för att bekräfta resultaten.Enligt vår forskning konstaterades att de vanligaste användningsfallen för CIs var kundservice, försäljning, resor och bokningar, utbildning, sjukvård och som röstassistenter. De mest framstående utmaningarna för CIs var dålig användbarhet, språkhantering och förståelse, taligenkänning och naturlig språkgenerering och säkerhet och integritet. Sammanfattningsvis ser framtiden lovande ut för CIs, men de måste undersökas och utvecklas ytterligare för att hjälpa dem att uppnå utbredd användning i framtiden.

From being a fictional element in sci-fi movies, voice user interaction has become reality with intelligent personal assistants like Apple’s Sir iand Google’s Assistant. The development opens up for new exciting user experiences and challenges when designing for these experiences. This thesis has aimed to investigate the user experience of different ways of onboarding new users to intelligent personalassistants. The process has included interviews with experienced users, a test of a Google Home for three months and a wizard of oz (WOZ) test. The interviews and the long term test was done in correlation with a literature study to determine how users interact with an intelligent personal assistant (IPA) their flaws, benefits, what added value they have etc. The goal of the WOZ test was to compare two different teaching methods during the onboarding of a new user. The methods were a voice tutorial by the IPA and a visual interaction on a mobile device. The outcome was to see if the users memory retention was different between the two methods for features learned during the test as well as the users opinions of the two different methods. The results from the interviews show that the benefits of using an IPA is in situations where it reduces friction, e.g when both hands are occupied. They also showed that there are still issues with IPAs and there is a long way to go before they can a accomplish a more human-to-human like conversation. In the WOZ test the results showed that there were no significant difference in user remembrance of learnt features between the two teaching methods. However the user insights showed that the majority of users would like to have a multimodal interaction, a combination of voice and visual interaction when being taught to use an IPA.

L'objectif principal de cette thèse est le développement et l'implantation d'une assistance active pour l'évitement des sorties involontaires de la voie de circulation. Les caractéristiques de cette assistance se déclinent ainsi : - intervention dans les moments d'inactivité du conducteur alors que la sortie de voie devient imminente et rétablissement de la situation de maintien de voie, - action partagée avec le conducteur sur la direction du véhicule, - fonctionnement sur des routes à faible et à forte courbure, - efficacité quelle que soit la qualité de la route, à forte ou à faible adhérence.

Background: E-commerce is widespread in today’s shopping routines and conversational commerce (CC) as an expansion, aims at integrating customers and businesses on a whole new level. Through the application of chatbots fueled by artificial intelligence, a more personal and individual way of remote shopping is offered. Purpose: Our research question What potential attributes of AI-fueled CC applications and their possible inherent characteristics are determining the willingness to use them and to what extent, in the context of digital natives living in Sweden and Germany? aims at identifying the demanded attributes of conversational commerce from a consumer perspective. Method: We facilitate a quantitative questionnaire with 118 valid answers to administer a traditional full-profile conjoint analysis. Conclusion: Our results indicate that German digital natives deem a CC application’s behavior as the most important attribute, followed by payment method, personality and communication form (voice or text). The Swedish digital natives however, attach the most importance to the payment method, followed by behavior, communication form and personality. Both have in common that they prefer a rather passive behavior over being actively approached, a personality that is balanced between humor and seriousness and text-based communication over voice. A difference is the Swedish preference for direct in-app payment while German digital natives would select a redirection to a secondary payment provider (e.g. PayPal).

В работе производиться анализ многоагентных интеллектуальных систем, их различия, способы и направления применения. Описываются программы и методы создания аудио управляемого синтеза лица. Также обсуждаются различные цифровые голосовые помощники, виртуальные агенты. Рассматривается гипотеза и перспективы создания визуального виртуального цифрового помощника для средств массовой информации.
The paper analyzes multi-agent intelligent systems, their differences, ways and directions of application. Programs and methods for creating audio-controlled face synthesis are described. Various digital voice assistants and virtual agents are also discussed. The hypothesis and prospects of creating a visual virtual digital assistant for mass media are considered.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is often discussed as something extraordinary, a dream—or a nightmare—that awakens metaphysical questions on human life. Yet far from a distant technology of the future, the true power of AI lies in its subtle revolution of ordinary life. From voice assistants like Siri to natural language processors, AI technologies use cultural biases and modern psychology to fit specific characteristics of how users perceive and navigate the external world, thereby projecting the illusion of intelligence. Integrating media studies, science and technology studies, and social psychology, Deceitful Media examines the rise of artificial intelligence throughout history and exposes the very human fallacies behind this technology. Focusing specifically on communicative AIs, Natale argues that what we call “AI” is not a form of intelligence but rather a reflection of the human user. Using the term “banal deception,” he reveals that deception forms the basis of all human-computer interactions rooted in AI technologies, as technologies like voice assistants utilize the dynamics of projection and stereotyping as a means for aligning with our existing habits and social conventions. By exploiting the human instinct to connect, AI reveals our collective vulnerabilities to deception, showing that what machines are primarily changing is not other technology but ourselves as humans. Deceitful Media illustrates how AI has continued a tradition of technologies that mobilize our liability to deception and shows that only by better understanding our vulnerabilities to deception can we become more sophisticated consumers of interactive media.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

The article describes applications of using voice recognition technology based on artificial intelligence to the educational process. The author presents a comparative analysis of existing examples artificial intelligence in the educational process. Artificial intelligence uses in specialized software it makes educational process more convenient for both the students and the teachers. There is a description of an application “Academic phrase bank" developed by author. The application consists of two specialising actions for Google assistant. The application allows to increase academic vocabulary, train of creating grammatically correct academic expressions, and memorize templates of academic phrases. In active mode, this application helps to create correct phrases of academic English and improve the abilities of understanding English speech.