Ohanashi Assistant

» see au.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

KDDI and Okinawa Cellular put out release number 2012-270 on 15 October 2012, and its subtitle did the selling: au's first voice recognition service for Android smartphones. The app was called Ohanashi Assistant, roughly "the talking assistant". It arrived on 1 November, free, installed from au Market. You pressed a microphone button and said what you wanted.

The pitch was about difficulty rather than about intelligence. Smartphones are full of useful functions, the service page said, but the operation is hard and typing an email is a chore. So you spoke instead. The documented examples are domestic to the point of being touching. Say "call Kato-san" and it opened the dialer with a number already in it. Say "email mother" and it filled in the recipient and the subject line before writing a body, then handed the finished thing to whatever mail app the handset had. Say "wake me at seven tomorrow" and the alarm app opened with the alarm set.

What held this inside Japan was narrower than a border. It shipped in au Market, the app store for handsets sold by one carrier, so the population who could install it was defined by a contract rather than by a platform or a language. The page that stands where the product used to be is three lines long. It gives the date, 31 July 2018, and thanks you for having used it. It does not say why.

~ the record ~

~ the voice came from two places ~

Listening was bought in. The recognition engine was AmiVoice, licensed from Advanced Media in Toshima, Tokyo, which had been selling Japanese speech recognition to call centers and hospitals for years before anyone wanted it in a pocket.

Speaking was built at home. A Japanese synthesis package called N2, written at KDDI R&D Laboratories in Fujimino, Saitama, did the talking, and the press release made a specific claim for it: that it ran smoothly on the Android handset by itself, in low memory. That was the interesting half in 2012. Recognition went to a server because it had to. Synthesis did not, and KDDI had decided its phones should be able to speak without asking the network first.

~ the assistant you could dress ~

The free tier was the entire command list. The paid course cost 105 yen a month with tax, came with ten days free, and added exactly two capabilities. One was a life log, which kept what you had said to the assistant so you could go back and read it. The other was costumes for the assistant character.

That pairing deserves a moment. The premium upgrade on a 2012 voice interface was a transcript of your own speech and a wardrobe for the thing that had been listening to it.

~ a mode for asking the phone about the phone ~

The last feature in the documentation is the strangest and the most honest. It was called au shop mode, and in it the assistant answered questions about au's services and about smartphones in general. The carrier had taken a slice of its own retail counter and put it inside the app, so a customer who could not work the handset could ask the handset.

By the time it closed in July 2018, Google Assistant had been speaking Japanese on Android phones in Japan for more than a year, free, with no 105 yen tier and no outfits. A carrier-specific voice app had nowhere left to stand. KDDI never wrote that down, and what it left behind instead was the end date.

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