https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200311161848.htm

This localization task was the focus of a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign research team's recently published paper, "Voice Localization Using Nearby Wall Reflections." The work was accepted to the 26th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. In the paper, the team -- led by Coordinated Science Lab graduate student Sheng Shen -- explores the development of VoLoc, a system that uses the microphone array on Alexa, as well as room echoes of the human voice, to infer the user location inside the home.

Knowing a user's location within a home could help a smart device better support currently available skills. For instance, after receiving commands like "turn on the light" or "increase the temperature," Alexa currently has to guess which light and room is at the heart of the command. Using a technique known as reverse triangulation, Shen and advisor Romit Roy Choudhury are getting closer to voice localization.