Talk of the Town
The most powerful software of the future may be your very own
voice.
. Illustration by Huan Tran.
Your wallet is empty and you're hungry, so you do the logical
thing: You ask your car, "Where's the nearest
ATM, and, by the way,
where's the nearest sushi restaurant?" No, you're not crazy. You're
just driving a
Honda Accord equipped with Touch by Voice, a
voice-recognition system powered by
IBM. Seconds later, the car
talks back through its speaker system, telling you where to load up
on cash and also where to score a
California roll. It all happens
so effortlessly that you forget you're talking to a computer.
Slowly, discreetly but pervasively,
voice recognition - where
computers hear us speak and know what we mean - has become a part
of our everyday lives. "It's amazing how often most of us now use
voice recognition, frequently without realizing we are," says
Peter Mahoney, vice president of marketing for Nuance
Communications, a Burlington, Massachusetts-based developer of
tools for what the trade calls "voice rec."
About a decade ago, when big companies first began experimenting
with voice recognition, we definitely knew we were tangling with
it, because most of the time the systems did not work. Computers
would whine, "Could you say that again?" "Sorry. I don't
understand." Our reaction was a swift no thanks - give us a person
to speak with. Now computers
do understand us. "Accuracy is
much better today," says Mahoney, thanks to computers that are
smarter and more powerful. Underlying recognition algorithms (the
math that shapes the systems) have gotten better, too, as having 10
years of input has permitted researchers to tweak their formulas to
let us speak more naturally but still be understood.