Power of the Spoken Word

A whille back I talked about how Apple’s Siri voice navigation system appears to have no limit to its application. Rush Limbaugh uses the real-time transcription capability to provide almost immediate text conversion of his broadcasts which in turn can be pushed to any social media interface. The Bluetooth® link in my car allows me to verbally control the iPhone hands-free. And who hasn’t yet had the ‘pleasure’ of navigating through those pesky pre-selection ‘trees’ when calling into airline reservation centers, banking services, service centers, etc. etc. Application of vocal-interpretive systems has been around a long time. Thankfully they are becoming much more conversationally adept at putting a ‘human’ interface on a technological mechanism.

Many of the first iterations were painful to say the least. Early attempts to verbalize text – the easier of two processes - often resulted in what was commonly referred to as ‘the drunken Swede’, that recognizable, inaccurate, annoying robotic conversion of written text to spoken word. Most early development efforts focused on the text-to-speech process because it was technologically simpler to achieve than its infinitely-challenging speech-to-text cousin.

Since the spoken word embodies so much information simple, direct, word-forword interpretation is inadequate. Strung together in vastly varying ways, our words can have multiple meanings. Our speech is filled with emotion, insinuative inflection, and multi-definitive context which poses enormous challenges for speech-to-text system designers. Language, after all, is an art. Technology is anything but.

Siri, and others like ‘her’, are shining examples of application brilliance. The developers of this amazing capability have succeeded in putting a virtually-human interface on what must be a vastly complex technological system, resulting in our ability to easily put it to work for us.

I’m certain this is only a beginning. In the near future I believe everything, and I do mean everything, will be voice-command-enabled, dramatically impacting the way we interface with our machines. Say goodbye to your keyboard, mouse and touchscreen. Say goodbye to your remote controls, light switches and thermostats. Say goodbye to buttons, dials, knobs and levers.

Say “hello” to Siri!