IBM's voice-recognition guru, Brian Garr, says scientific ambitions
are white-water fast when it comes to what
voice recognition will
do next.
IBM's Superhuman Speech project, for instance, aims to
create computers that are better at understanding speech than
humans are, says Garr. That's right,
better than we are. "We
believe we will be there by 2011," he says.
"We're still in the early days of
speech recognition, comparable to
where the Internet was 10 years ago," adds Garr. But, watch out, he
says, because just as the Internet became integral to our lives, so
will speech rec, probably a lot faster than we expect. "We're just
now figuring out so many new uses."
The examples keep multiplying. A case in point, coming probably
within the next year to your cell phone: "You'll be able to dictate
SMS messages into your wireless," predicts Nuance's Mahoney, whose
company is far along in its development of that very tool.
Picture zapping this message to a coworker: "SMS iz kewl 2 uz, bt a
pain 2 typ, w aL d multi-tapping. It wud b so gr8 jst 2 spk it!"
How long would it have taken you to tap that into a phone? And
that's assuming you know the
SMS shorthand that allows quicker
input. But it would be many times faster just to dictate your
message and let the smart phone do the typing for you.
"Big leaps are coming in the near future," promises Mahoney. The
technology, finally, is here - computers hear and understand us.
Now it comes down to creating tools we want to use - and that, says
Mahoney, is exactly what's going on. Can you hear it happening?
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