D. JonesTalk to me...Technology?
April 3rd 2010 23:00
Let your computer do the texting!
The idea that people should be able to talk to computers, and that the computers should understand what we're saying, has been coming in and out of vogue since the 1970s. The technology never really went mainstream though, and is usually referred to as a joke. In recent months, however, despite the pop-culture parodies and the increasing popularity of the text message, researchers say voice-activated technologies have entered a renaissance of sorts. The technological resurgence is happening in part because of smartphones, those handheld devices with tiny keyboards or awkward touchscreens that some big-fingered adults would rather yell at than type on (Yes, the pad is getting smaller and smaller..who are these for...babies?)
Mobile voice-recognition technology now allows people to send text messages to friends by talking instead of typing; to scan through transcriptions of voice mail instead of taking time to listen to them all, to tell their phones what they're looking for on the Web, and soon, to post to Twitter from their cars by speaking, allowing drivers to keep their eyes on the road (Good, because posting to Twitter or "Nitwitter" as I like to call it, is much more important than say, causing a freakin' accident!) Phones should know by now exactly what Web link to find, experts say, and users should get a result without ever typing. A number of phone apps, from ShoutOut to Dragon and Vlingo, now translate speech into text messages and e-mails. Additionally, Bing and Google both have mobile applications that let people search the Web by talking.
The voice-recognition software is also getting better, too. The longer computers listen to us talk, the better they can predict what we're going to say and understand how we say things, researchers said Some believe that computers are getting almost as good at listening as we are. The technology works by listening to a voice, translating it into digital data and then anticipating what sorts of sounds or words will come next. (Oh great... "someone" ELSE to butt into my conversation before I'm finished!) That's different from early models of voice-recognition technology, which tried to understand every sound and used huge amounts of computing power as a result. One issue, especially for voice recognition on the go, is background noise. A phone listening to a person on a bus, for example, can hear street noise and other conversations in addition to the person who is trying to give a voice command. It's difficult for voice-recognition software to differentiate between all of those noises.
New hardware may help address that issue. Google's Nexus One phone comes fitted with two microphones: one that records a voice and another that records interference noise and then subtracts it from the voice file, making it easier for the phone to determine what noise is human and what isn't. But despite its drawbacks, voice may be the new way we interact with computers.
A little creepy, but cool!
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