Detect the speaker of Google Home or Amazon's Alexa

Question

I would like to detect who is interacting with my agent.

For example I read that Alexa should be able to detect different users. The Google Home advertisement also let me think that it should detect who is talking. So how can I see who is talking?

In slack it seems to be easier since it is well known who is writing. However I cannot see who I get the current user.

Answer 1

I found out how to detect the user in slack: If you implement that hook you will get this example json:

{
    "id": "f7912345-e21c-450f-a8ca-d01e38012345",
    "timestamp": "2016-12-20T06:53:51.071Z",
    "result": {
        "source": "agent",
        "resolvedQuery": "echo hallo welt",
        "speech": "",
        "action": "",
        "actionIncomplete": false,
        "parameters": {
            "myInput": "hallo welt"
        },
        "contexts": [{
            "name": "generic",
            "parameters": {
                "slack_user_id": "U0AT12345",
                "myInput": "hallo welt",
                "slack_channel": "D3DR12345",
                "myInput.original": "hallo welt"
            },
            "lifespan": 4
        }],
        "metadata": {
            "intentId": "06212345-06a0-40fe-bbeb-9189db412345",
            "webhookUsed": "true",
            "webhookForSlotFillingUsed": "false",
            "intentName": "Response"
        },
        "fulfillment": {
            "speech": "",
            "messages": [{
                "type": 0,
                "speech": ""
            }]
        },
        "score": 0.75
    },
    "status": {
        "code": 200,
        "errorType": "success"
    },
    "sessionId": "10612345-c681-11e6-af08-875120912345",
    "originalRequest": {
        "source": "slack_testbot",
        "data": {
            "channel": "D3DR12345",
            "match": ["echo hallo welt"],
            "text": "echo hallo welt",
            "team": "T04H12345",
            "type": "message",
            "event": "direct_message",
            "user": "U0AT12345",
            "ts": "1482216830.000005"
        }
    }
}

So in case of slack you can access result->contexts[0]->paramaters->slack_user_id.

Answer 2

Google Home does not (at least currently) have a way to handle multiple users on the same device.

Answer 3

Google Home keeps improving (even removing development hurdles I've faced with their recent updates). It can now be trained to know your voice vs someone else's voice.

Tomato, tomahto. Google Home now supports multiple users