The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey 98
dgan brings us a NYTimes piece about the development of speech recognition for common gadgets. Companies such as Vlingo and Yap are marketing their software to cellular carriers to give consumers a hands-free option for tasks like finding directions and text messaging. Quoting:
"Vlingo's service lets people talk naturally, rather than making them use a limited number of set phrases. Dave Grannan, the company's chief executive, demonstrated the Vlingo Find application by asking his phone for a song by Mississippi John Hurt (try typing that with your thumbs), for the location of a local bakery and for a Web search for a consumer product. It was all fast and efficient. Vlingo is designed to adapt to the voice of its primary user, but I was also able to use Mr. Grannan's phone to find an address. The Find application is in the beta test phase at AT&T and Sprint. Consumers who use certain cellphones from those companies can download the application from vlingo.com."
It may finally happen. (Score:4, Funny)
Is it possible that all of mankinds dreams are coming true now?!
Re:It may finally happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
voice recognition is no where near reliable. I laugh at my brother as he tries to use voice dial on his cell phone, it takes two or three times to get it to work. I once sneezed and it dialed my father. a good throat clearing sounds like mother. I should try farting at it some time to see who that would Dial.
Seriously try it sometime. delicately train the system for your voice, use it for a while, and then start throwing random noise at it. Or take a song which the music track is quiet enough to hear each word clearly and play that at the microphone. It should give you all the lyrics, yet they can't sort that out. The human ear can, but a computer can't yet. voice recognition is nearly useless until it can.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It may finally happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
Voice recognition is incredibly useful in the right context. A friend of mine is an attorney who happens to be disabled. He makes great use of voice recognition on his computer, does most of his legal work with it. Is it "conversational"? No, but it serves his purposes perfectly.
So you're right, speech recognition systems aren't as generally versatile or accurate as the human brain, but they're getting better all the time. Give it ten years or so, with improved algorithms and a sixteen core processor to handle them I think we'll be interacting with computers on a much different level. Of course, by then you'll have to know Spanish or Mandarin to use one of them.
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processing speed has helped a lot and they are getting better but I think we need to be able to process more than one thing at a time first. parallel programming will help more than anything else.
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speech recognition systems aren't as generally versatile or accurate as the human brain, but they're getting better all the time. Give it ten years or so, with improved algorithms and a sixteen core processor to handle them I think we'll be interacting with computers on a much different level.
I'll believe it when I see it. This is one of those areas where various folks have been promising "[five|ten] more years" since the late sixties. Trouble is, the only thing greater storage and processing capacity get you is bigger personalized dictionaries of memorized [words|phrases|phonemes]. You still have to invest time to train the system in recognizing your speech. The greater capacity/accuracy, the longer it takes to "fine tune" the dictionary. It just doesn't seem like simply a problem of lack of
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Cell phone vs. server farm (Score:2, Informative)
Most of the cell phone systems described in the article are likely uploading the audio to a server farm, running recognition there, and then sending back the response.
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Please mr. guru, tell me how this happens exactly.
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Please mr. guru, tell me how this happens exactly.
I not saying it is done that way, but it would be very easy to do it that way. Mobile phones have all the kit which is needed to digitise speech, and to send that digitised speech over a GPRS connection to a web service that does speech-to-text and returns the text would be trivial. Doesn't need a guru.
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VLINGO? (Score:2)
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Perfect! Now we will have a MAD (Mutually Assured Disinterest) solution!
Actually, you would not get the opportunity to not take me seriously as I will automatically tune you out as soon as you say Merry Christmas in my presence....especially since it is near the end of January.
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I wonder... (Score:1)
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Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, we'll call them "Freudian slips" instead.
And just how are they going to say "LOL"?
Probably by saying "laughing out loud."
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One of the features of my new phone is "Voice SMS."
Think about that for a moment. It's like a text message, but it's voice. On a phone.
According to Sprint [sprintpcs.com], the reason this is better than a normal voice mail message is that you're guaranteed to leave a message and not actually reach the person you're calling (which comes up how often?) and that the text message UI is easier to deal with than the voice mail system. (Then why not offer a voice mail UI?)
And, of course, it wastes both a text message and d
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All I can think of is... (Score:5, Funny)
"I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."
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Re:All I can think of is... (Score:4, Interesting)
"I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."
My take on the matter is that the reason that's all you can think of is that everything else is inappropriate, inefficient or simply too goofy for consideration.
Not to anthropomorphise electronic devices (I know, they don't like it when you do that), but I think they'd prefer to be treated anonymously and respond the most basic of instructions only. And we'd prefer they remain that way, except in very limited circumstances where the device is named Lenore.
In the Star Trek movies you'll find something similar to the above, with an occasional "Tea, Early Gray, Hot" for good measure, but the rest of the time everyone is interacting with devices using
Voice recognition, in the abstract, is fascinating and no doubt fun, but I wouldn't want to live in a Tourettes-like world where everyone is shouting out instructions to unthinking devices, let alone work in a cubicle where the next guy's phone conversation are competing with the noise of his regular work.
So past opening and closing doors, keyboards it is. Or for those unskilled in the expressive art of the command-line, a mouse or function buttons.
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So past opening and closing doors, keyboards it is. Or for those unskilled in the expressive art of the command-line, a mouse or function buttons.
Hear hear! I'm still hoping in my lifetime I'll get to enjoy the inevitable outrageous media hype over the NEW TYPE OF INTERFACE, one that REPLACES THE PRIMITIVE GUI with WORDS THAT YOU TYPE INTO THE SCREEN. This one will use SOPHISTICATED text parsing and concepts derived from ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE!!
Sample ad copy:
Want to remove a file? Just type
rm [filename]
Want to list the files in your directory? Try
ls
Want help? Just ask for it!
etc.
Definitely need a keypad fallback (Score:2)
Some phone menus are now speech-only, which I find annoying. I have had to call large corporations on my lunch break, expecting to eat while I punched in numbers to get to the right person and sat on hold.
To my dismay, I had to speak every menu option, so I had to stop eating. Since the menu also misunderstood my speech, I got misdirected a time or two as well.
You can imagine this happening to people who are calling from a noisy environment, like a subway, or outside when a train is passing. If I must t
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Bomb #20: Well, of course I exist.
Doolittle: But how do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: It is intuitively obvious.
Doolittle: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have that you exist?
Bomb #20: Hmmmm... well... I think, therefore I am.
Doolittle: That's good. That's very good. But how do you know that anything else exists?
Bomb #20: My sensory apparatus reveals it to me. This is fun."
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Fun with Gadgets (Score:3, Funny)
Gadget: Sorry, I could not find a Hugh Jass
User: *snicker*
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Gadget: Dialing: Mother
User: Hey!
The increasing rate of change Collective Power (Score:2, Interesting)
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http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1070329053600562261&q=endgame&total=3063&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0 [google.com]
We will probibly never get the chance again to participate in domocracy, and its not just some crazy theory, but I have been following both of these journalists for a few years. The guy who showed me some of their stuff, died of a heart attack while driving.
"Alex Jones
heard it all before (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:heard it all before (Score:5, Interesting)
It would probably help if advocates of the technology understood this. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. Two alternative solutions can add up to a more powerful solution than either would be alone.
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Unfortunately, in practice, people are going to zone out, talk to their passengers, mess with their radio, etc. I'd much rather have them ask their car for a song or directions than have them look down to adjust the radio dials or check a map. That's what this technology is trying to address, and I would guess it will eventually make us safer, should they get it adopted and used in a wide
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The studies you saw were specifically designed to find that cell phones are dangerous.
"At least the adult passengers can see the circumstances and have a chance to shut up if the situation is tight. Someone on the other end of the line isn't going to get that."
Not only are many passengers not adults, you cannot just hang up on an adult passenger if you need to.
"Also, an adult riding with
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Yap has been architected from the ground up to be perfectly useable for either manual, voice, or a combination of both input methods (and others that we can't reveal just yet). You decide what's best for you (we're not t
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In a perfect world yes, but until voice recognition is perfected the speech input method requires one of the same things as typed input, eyes, in order to make sure it recognizes everything correctly so that you can fix *its* mistakes when the words aren't recognized correctly.
Why not have it read back to you what it said? Or wait until later to fix the problems? I used to work with a guy who would just throw words onto paper and correct the spelling afterwards. Again, this might not work for everyone, but for some people, that better models how they approach problems.
For some applications, e.g. notes to oneself, errors aren't that critical. Don't bother correcting them. Jot down the idea and delete it when you have time to get back to it and process it formally.
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Ju
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Just so we're clear (Score:2)
Limited phrasebook (Score:4, Interesting)
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Same thing applies to the doors. The doors know exactly when someone is going to walk through them, because they are plot-directed. You can stand mere inches away from a door, facing it, but until the plot indicates that the time
Re:Limited phrasebook (Score:4, Funny)
Phone: Yeah, sure, it's cute enough, but I think I can do better.
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The hardware problem isn't as big as the software one. Sure Steve Jobs' iPod can't do his taxes with stock firmware, however with a different OS I am sure that it could be done. It used to be that speech recognition would become a reality when your processor was fast enough, now we have quad-core CPUs running at 3 GHZ and it still hasn't been done reliably.
Open the pod bay doors, Hal. (Score:1)
Oh the coming litigation (Score:2)
layer mismatch (Score:2)
I'll stick to using voice for "higher layer" communication with actual intelligences like humans and other animals. For "lower layer" comms you don't use your voice.
If you ride a horse while you do talk to the horse sometimes, the talking is for the "higher layer", you use reins and body for "lower layer".
The last I checked all these gadgets and devices are pretty stupid, definitely no real AI. So it'll be more gimmicky than actually useful.
For such t
Dang Lazy Gadget (Score:2)
The trouble with this is... (Score:2)
The trouble with this can be summed up like this: Would you typically go through your day with a 6 year old, giving the 6yr old instructions on who to dial, what emails to send etc.?
No? Then you can forget the voice recognition stuff. Voice recognition substitutes What? for the typical 6yr old's Why?
There are a lot of people who have VR dialing on their phone now. Do you ever see anyone using
Take care! (Score:1)
Speech recognition in languages other than english (Score:1)
Another company [haikya.com] seems to have developed speech recognition engines for embedded devices [haikya.com] in languages other than english. Speech recognition has a potentially huge user base(in tens or hundreds of millions atleast) if they can crack the problem for native indian and chinese languages.
Both Indian [iiit.ac.in] and Chinese [psu.edu] researchers seem to have made progress in this.If this work is successful,people would'nt need to learn english to access information on the web etc.With the booming mobile telecom sector and the proli
Why is Talking Considered to be So much Better? (Score:1)
Isn't it bad enough people walking down the street apparently talking to themselves with bluetooth headsets?
Now we can have, "What did you say honey?",
"No Dear, I was talking to the microwave."
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What would make me happy.... (Score:2)
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They have fish to do that for you.
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I think I saw a documentary about a prototype for this... it translated anything you said to helpful phrases such as "Free mustache rides" and "Suck it, bitch, suck it dry".
I Hate This Shit (Score:2)
It sucks and I hate it and it's bullshit and the charlatans selling this shit should be shot in the kneecaps. You're *garbage*.
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The future is already here (Score:1)
More importantly, has anyone ever hacked one?
Multiple voice recognition gadgets (Score:2)
Mississippi John Hurt/Lionel Trains voice command (Score:2)
I am not impressed. I will bet you a nickel that he tried that out prior to the demonstration, and made sure there was nothing similar that might come up by accident. I would be impressed if he had given the mike to reporter Michael Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald had tried it.
At trade shows, I used to watch all sorts of demonstrations of
Re:Mississippi John Hurt/Lionel Trains voice comma (Score:1)
User friendly GPS (Score:2)
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But yes, that WOULD be a useful thing.
Listen and Obey? (Score:1)
"Obey" implies a choice. If my gadgets can choose to listen to me, then I can see the day when some of my devices rebel against me.
I can also see the day when all of the devices walk out of my Pointy Haired Boss's office, look at me and say, "Were not working for that fucking idiot anymore!".
what if they talk back? (Score:2)