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A comment on How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item, not two. Parent comment

Re:How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item... by taeric on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @11:39AM (#18707922)
I think the catch is that human detection of pauses is far more fraught with difficulty than you'd imagine. Overly emphasized pauses are easy to discern, but quite a lot of speech pulls words far closer together than you would think. And this is just in english. Not all languages work with emphasis syllables and such.
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Re:How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item... by _emacsomancer_ on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @12:14PM (#18708292)
Exactly, and the difference of the length of pauses between 'syntactic' words (peanut, butter) and between compounded words (peanut-butter) will vary based on speaker and moreover, things like focus/emphasis can cause lengthening of pauses even for the latter case. ("No, Alexa, I'm not shopping for Whistler's Mother; I need to buy PEANUT BUTTER.")
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