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Google, iPhone and the Future of Machines That Listen
By John Markoff
How do you talk to a search engine? In Googlish, of course.
Google’s new speech recognition service for the iPhone, which I wrote about last week and which was released on Monday, understands you most accurately when you speak to it just the way you enter queries into the Google search box. That makes sense, because the system’s accuracy comes from the billions and billions of typed queries that Google has recorded over the years.
Google’s voice search software for iPhones. (Peter DaSilva for The New York Times)
So don’t bother with polite formalisms like “What is the best pizza restaurant in San Francisco?” Simply say “best pizza restaurant San Francisco.”
After all, you’re talking to a dumb machine — or perhaps several, distributed across multiple states.
The accuracy is far from 100 percent, and probably not even 95 percent (Google execs demurred when I asked if they had any meaningful accuracy statistics). My experience is that it captures your voice query substantially more than half the time, and that in itself is a revelation. It also makes the usual sampling of funny mistakes. (My favorite was my inability to get it to recognize “Camp Unalayee,” which I attended as a teenager. It would usually respond “Camp Ukulele.” But heck, unalayee is a Cherokee word that means “place of friends,” and ukulele is in the dictionary.)
Yet after five days of using the service it still seems better than any speech recognition system I have used to date. It may even signify an inflection point — speech recognition that is more useful than typing.
I was initially intrigued by the Google Mobile App because I have been following the progress of speech recognition research since the early 1980s. Progress in this field feels like watching paint dry. Yet the industry’s visionaries have been unanimous in saying that we will talk to machines — and they will understand us — someday.
It was probably in 1983 that researchers at SRI International demonstrated how they could control simulated battleships with voice commands (“go left,” “go right,” “stop,” that sort of thing). Evolution has been slow because it turns out that recognizing speech is a really, really hard problem. There are all the complexities of language, plus accents and background noise.
In the past decade, however, progress has accelerated. The stakes are very high and there are a number of big and small players. The search giants Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all believe speech recognition is a prerequisite for the era of mobile computing. And there are lots of others including I.B.M., Nuance and Vlingo that are developing speech technology.
Although Microsoft hasn’t dominated in this area yet, the company has been investing heavily in research in the field going back to the 1980s. Last year it spent close to $1 billion to acquire Tellme Networks, a company based in Silicon Valley that supplies speech recognition for the phone directory and operator assistance market.
“You want to be able to interact with your phone just like you would with your mom or friends,” said Dariusz Paczuski, senior director for consumer services at Tellme. “Voice is a great interface and it can simplify interactions more than anything.”
Everyone agrees that in mobile applications, speech is the obvious user interface. Whether it’s on a BlackBerry, an Android phone or an iPhone, typing will always be error-prone and frustrating.
If one company makes a major breakthrough in voice, it is potentially a major threat to its rivals, because a “speech interface” could potentially allow one company to simply take over a handheld device developed by another company.
For some time we seem to have been stuck at the stage where speech recognition works, but just sort of. Perhaps we are at a moment like the one when A.T.M.’s were first introduced. At first most people said they preferred interacting with a human bank teller. Then, overnight it seemed, everyone realized that the bank teller relationship wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Now most of us never set foot inside a bank. How long before people find that it is more efficient to deal with a robot on the phone than a human?
Enough with the future-gazing. Right now there is something compelling about saying “backpacking trails Trinity Alps California,” and being taken directly to a Web site listing all of the best ones.
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36 comments:
The addition of interactive voice recognition allows a greater ease of acessability and is proving to be a key ergonomic feature in the modern market. Interaction between users and their mobile phones or other forms of media however in the past have genereated problematic results. Common errors such as misinterpretation and language barriers have been present in the past, an example being the common speech recognition demands on speed dial features for mobile phones. Despite past difficulties this article claims to have resolved such issues and if so has developed and raised the bar in terms of ergonomic access in modern technology.
This new speech recognition for iphones using google seems to be a very good idea. The only potential problem with this is that it may not be fully accurate because most voice recognition programs do not corectly recognize words. Though if this does work efficiently it will make searching on google much easier and faster.
This article addresses the issue of reliability, globalization and equality of access.
The users of iphones and blackberries are concerned with whether or not the PDAs will recognize the right word, there have been countless problems with voice recognition in mobile phones because when they say a person's name to call they sometimes call another person.
People were also concerned with the reliability of the internet themselves when the internet and email was first introduced because people were not sure whether or not others where receiving their emails.
The future for voice recognition in PDAs is that the technology will improve a great deal and people will be more willing to utilize voice recognition features on mobile phones and purchase PDAs with voice recognition and this will have positive impacts on the economy.
Progress in speech recognition has accelerated over the years, and the accuracy of Google's speech recognition service for the iPhone is quite a revelation considering the various other speech recognition systems. This makes the system accessible and more easy to use, especially since so many typing errors can be made with just using the phone on it's own. The only question that remains is the language problems that will come with this service, such as accents and background noise.
this is a very interesting article. it just comes to show how much technology has improved and now functions as human beings. although voice recognition devices have been there for a while this is revolutionary. you can find out many facts simply by speaking through a machine. meanwhile these machines are not even 95% accurate. machines cannot always be relied on for information. they don't function as human beings precisely they only take commands. the language barrier is a huge issue because of misinterpreatations of words mostly due to accents or the word itself (silent letters). besides these problems the futures holds many answers and resolution adn this article proclaims that many of these issues have been resolved to enhance technology.
This is a drastic improvement in technology, it would make life much easier especially for people who don't know how to type, therefore they would be able to search things using their voice. It would however be difficult for people who have difficulty in pronunciation and for people who their mother tongue is not english.
Technology for Voice Recognition software has reached the next step; Google have now applied their new voice recognition application to their heavily-used search engine in the I phone. Even though this enhanced technology isn't 100% accurate it is much better than other similar applications, plus this technology hasn't reached its peek and is still in its development stage.
The issues that adress this area is privacy because if the user is in a public area he would have to speak in front of everyone.
The stake holders are the company Google who developed this technology, Apple who applied it in their I Phone and the user who is using the product.
This article addresses the issue of reliability. Google and iPhone have new services for users such as voice recognition; this new trend brings advantages to people because they are now able to talk to machines just like people using A.T.M’s it just requires time for people to get used to this new feature. The interaction between humans is affected because people are now going to interact with machines and people in the future won’t know how to talk to people on the phones. Another issue is how this recognition feature only recognizes American accents and doesn’t really work if you don’t have one “If you don’t have a US accent the results are poor”. I think that google should find a way to allow the recognition of different languages and accents.
This article talks about the Google interactive voice recognition, this makes the system easy to use and more accessible , especially since many typing errors are made with just using the phone.
The only problem is that the language problems that will come with this service, like accents and background noise.
another problem is the reliability of the internet itself.
Google's new speech recognition software for the iPhone is demonstrates a significant improvement in speech recognition software, where the software's accuracy and understanding of people's informal style of speaking has improved dramatically compared to other softwares'.
This software has a very powerful potential effect on society; people can interact with machines in a much more convenient and user-friendly way. When putting this software to more uses, it can be placed on technology instead of a keyboard. This way, there is no use of installing the very space-consuming, soon to be 'old-fashioned', keyboard. In this way, people can create more mobile computers and portable devices that do not carry the burden of a keyboard.
The stakeholders in this case are Google; they created this software and have given people a lot of hope and faith in this piece of software and people believe it will work smoothly. However, like any software created; it may not always work successfully, hence raising a reliability issue. Therefore, it could be that the software, which people are expecting to replace with their keyboard, is not ready to to replace the good old reliable keyboard.
The speech recognition software,demonstrates significant improvement in speech recognition software. It's proving to be a key ergonomic feature in the modern market.
In this case the concern is whether the PDAs will recognize the right word
through users of iphones and blackberries.
The future for voice recognition in PDAs is that the technology will improve a great deal and people will be more willing to utilize voice recognition features on mobile
Google Voice Recognition software is an improved innovation that is better than older voice recognition. Because the data stored to create the software is wider, more people's informal style are improved dramatically.
It has the effect of having people interact with machines: "people and machine". And this improves the wideness of technology and the quality of access.
The stakeholders are Google and it is a pretty reliable company to believe that their product is reliable...
This article is talking about the addition of interactive voice recognotion, it's a new feature which has been added onto iPhones which is a google box,where people enter their queries via speaking. Over the last 20 years, interactive voice recognition has been modified, and now it has a higher accuracy. However they are still problems, with the different accents, and different words such as plain or plane.
The voice recognition is a really good thing. It allows greated ease of acessability and is becoming a key orhanic feature in the modern market. This system is better than all the others and its easier to use. The only problem may be that it might not be very accurate and the language or lingu issues.
New speech regulation will be used for mobile phone application but because of technology, it has made a step forward to making voice recognition easier. One issue here is reliability, which showed in the article that because of different accents and background noises that are present, voice recognition with the speech regulation isn't that reliable. But due to the advance technology we have, we were able to give solutions to those problems and its only a matter of time, till what we already have developed would be more advance than before....
Technology is developing every day and with this progress comes the new technology discussed in the article. Problems do lie in language barriers but it says some if these problems have been resolved. This article is mainly about reliabilty and integrity. Will the IT system be able to provide us with the right information. Its accuracy is questioned. This article shows that the process of the world becoming more and more mechanized is just taking a few steps forward.
This new voice recognition that interacts with google is a very good program. This shows us how technology has developed,and how it is much easier and better now. A problem with these machines is that it is not as accurate, it can dial another person's number because it would not detect the voice properly. Other than that, it is great
this article addresses the issue of reliability. The voice recognition feature in iphones seems to be more effective when it comes to speech recognition than any of its predecessors. There will always be the issue of accents not being properly understood though.
There is also the issue of globalization. This improved feature aids to better the communication worldwide.
People will perhaps interact more with machines with the creation of a better voice recognition on their phones, hence narrowing the gap between people and machines.
Speech recognition is simply a window of communication between man and machine. This feature will make people more comfortable in a way that their computers will feel more like another human rather than a processing machine. The downside of speech recognition is reliability. Due to the fact that unlike text speech is never identical, thus meaning that many people will find it difficult to communicate with their computers due to accents, and many other factors.
oice recognition is becoming very advanced than in the 1980's. It has become more accurate then before. This could make interaction between user and mobile phone really easier. Google's speech technology, i think is really going to revolutionize speech technology and we can expect to see even more advances in this area.
The article relates to globalization, reliability and equality of access.
People are concerned with the reliability of the internet themselves when the internet and email was first introduced because people were not sure whether or not others where receiving their emails.
In the future PDA's will improve and there will be less problems and glitches with the software itself. As well as that this will have a positive impact on society
The addition of interactive voice recognition allows a greater ease of acessability and is proving to be a key ergonomic feature in the modern market. The only potential problem with this is that it may not be fully accurate because most voice recognition programs do not corectly recognize words. meanwhile these machines are not even 95% accurate. Machines cannot always be relied on for information.
I really think that the interaction in voice recognition in phones and other gadgets is really a way of making things much easier for everyone. It will provide scientific displine concerned with designing according to human needs. This job applies in theory and principles.
However, this could create a problem in being accurate and getting the voices to be 100% right. However, on the general idea, this would really help in globalization, as it is a HUGE step in technology.
This article addresses the issue of reliability, globalization and equality of access. this shows how much technology has improved and now functions as human beings.it would make life much easier especially for people who don't know how to type, therefore they would be able to search things using their voice.The issues that adress this area is privacy because if the user is in a public area he would have to speak in front of everyone. However they are still problems, with the different accents
this is a very interesting article. it just comes to show how much technology has improved and now functions as human beings. although voice recognition devices have been there for a while this is revolutionary. you can find out many facts simply by speaking through a machine. meanwhile these machines are not even 95% accurate. machines cannot always be relied on for information. they don't function as human beings precisely they only take commands. the language barrier is a huge issue because of misinterpreatations of words mostly due to accents or the word itself (silent letters). besides these problems the futures holds many answers and resolution adn this article proclaims that many of these issues have been resolved to enhance technology.
The issue that this Article rises is the Issue of reliability, globalization and equality of access. Interaction between users and their mobiles or other kinds of useful media. but recently this has been an Issue. The users of Mobile phones such as the iphones and blackberries are now awared if the PDAs will recognize the right word . so they might end up calling the wrong Person. So this technological device is only 95 % effecient.
but if the program in worked on and it works more properly , it would be a realible access in modern technology.
This article relates to the topic of interaction between people and machines. It enhanced the way people to use thier machines such hat they would have to speak instead of typing, which in todays society, is claimed to be "error prone and frustrating" which means they want something new and more efficient. The article also stated that the trend of speech recognition and how it has dramatically advanced from its start in the 1980s. So it is expected that speech recognition would be widely used by lots of people around the world in a few years.
This amazing technological development for search engines will help make the lives of smart phone users very much easier. It is really frustrating trying to type on phones like the BlackBerry and Iphone, which is why the voice recognition enhancement is a really brilliant and fun idea. There are bound to be a few glitches at first but there will be always room for improvement and the future looks bright for this very sophisticated and brilliant technology.
This truly is one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind!
The new speech recognition added to Iphones seems to be a positive addition. It makes it much esier fo the users to control their Iphones vocally without having to manually enter information.
One problem involved with this article is that the Iphone may continously misinterpret what the person is instructing it to do. This could be a problem due to the person's voice level as well as their accent and pronounciation.
The stakeholders involved in this article are clearly the manufacturers and designers of the Iphone. If they wish to sell the product globally and expand their business, they will need to make sure that the voice recognizer is ale to comprehend numerous languages and accents.
THIS IS LATIFA AL-THANI USING IMAN'S ACCOUNT. I DON'T REMEMBER MINE :D
This new speech recognition for iphones using google is a good idea. The only problem with this is that it may not be fully accurate. The voice recognition programs may not identify words; though if this does work it will make life easier. People were also concerned with the reliability of the technology.
adding a new application to whether it be an iPhone or Blackburry allows convenience when it comes to search engines or instructions, for the user. even though the users accesibility may expand, there would be problems that occur such as distortion of information and misinterpretation. also with that, there may be language barriers which would come into place which would limit some peoples accessibility to the new application. it is a modern type of application to the phones but companies need to keep those problems in mind.
areas of interaction may be humans and machines because of reliability and accesibility.
overall,this is a good idea because it would provide and easier and faster application to users.
Talking to the phone is not always "the way to do it", but I can understand why a lot of people would rather talk than write in their phones. When Microsoft word first tried to implicate it it did not go as planned. A user would have to train the computer for a long time and after you train it it still won't respond like you would want. However the first brand to take a hold of it , WILL MAKE MILLIONS.
After reading the article, it appears that the article addresses two issues.
Globalization.
Availability of access.
This is shown through the inability of other countries to gain access to that new development.
Also the stakeholders can not be assured that this investment will pay up in the future.
LARO
This article addresses the issue of globalization. Even though the speech recognition system is significantly more advanced than other speech recognition softwares, there are still many problems with the recognition of certain words that are not in the dictionary. The main search engines on the internet, including Google and Yahoo, all believe that speech recognition is a prerequisite for the era of mobile computing. Even though speech recognition works, it has not reached the stage of being completely reliable so therefore this article also addresses the issue of reliability. It will take people some time to get used to the idea of using speech recognition systems online in order to search for things because it will be a great change to what they were used to doing when they simply typed in keywords of what they wanted to look for. If the system is able to work efficiently, then it would allow increase the speed of searching online and also makes it much easier. The stakeholders are the people using the search engines because they may not be able to use to system at first and make searching more difficult for them. The other stakeholders include the makers of the speech recognition systems because it is up to them to make a system that works efficiently.
This article talks about Google's new speech recognition software for the iPhone. This will be a big improvement in speech recognition software, because the ' software's accuracy and understanding of people's informal style of speaking has improved dramatically compared to other softwares'.
This software makes it easier for people to interact with machines in a more user friendly way.
The stakeholders involved in this issue is Google. Google is the creator of this software. Usually when software is created there are possibilities that it might not work, and might not be too reliable.
This new speech recognition feature on the iPhone is an addition which will please many; it seems like a user friendly device which will make interaction easier. However, it is quite clear that there are many problems which could occur rendering the feature not as useble as people expect it to be - such as the issues regarding accents and misinterpretaion of speech.
The article presents the issues of equality of access and reliability. It will probably cause a lot of frustration once stakeholders such as the users realize that the voice recognition is not as accurate as they supposed. This will have an effect upon the sector of the company that deals with technical problems because there will be a sudden increase in issues and uncertainties.
The future of this tool is one which could be both negative and positive on society. If functioning as inteded, this form of voice recognition will probably become very widespread and reliable.
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