The interaction between humans and machines has undergone a change. The change is most noticeable in the use of voice based technology instead of the traditional text based instructions. It is evident in the march of technology especially the digital ones, into our lives. This trend is best observed in the growing use of virtual assistants such as Alexa, Siri, Ok Google and applications like Dragon Anywhere, Swype etc.
What does Voice recognition mean?
This involves a machine to receive, interpret, and analyse human voice commands and execute them. It has come to the fore with the emergence of AI based assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana.
When did speech recognition start?
The story of speech recognition took shape in the fifties and sixties when Bell Laboratories designed the ‘Audrey’ system that recognized digits. Thereafter, starting in the early 1970’s, the Hidden Markov Modelling (HMM) gave way to voice recognition.
How does this work?
An ADC (Analog to Digital Converter) translates your voice (read the analog waves) into digital data that the computer can understand. In doing so, the ADC system digitizes the sound waves by measuring the latter frequently and thereafter, filtering the digitized sound to remove the unwanted noise. Besides, since the public does not always speak at the same speed, the sound is suitably adjusted to match the pattern of sound samples.
Upcoming trends on voice-recognition:
In September, the Swift Keyboard released a new version wherein it can spot similar sentences, capture the relationship as well as the similarity between words. At present, it is available only in US and UK English but in future, more languages are expected to become a part of the same. Also, Baidu’s TalkType, which is operated entirely by a fully functional Android Keyboard helps users to type text three times faster.
Current Usage of speech recognition in the world:
Google CEO, Sundar Pichai says that 20% of Google searches in smartphones are done by voice and 40% of people use voice search once a day. Also, around 60% of people have started using voice search in the last 6 months. Interestingly, the speech recognition word error rate has been pegged at a lowly 8 percent.
Predictions:
It is said that by the year 2020, 50% of the searches will be in voice, according to ComScore. Moreover, according to MediaPost, about 30% of the searches will be without screen by the year 2020.
From Amazon Echo to Google Home: How do these gadgets help to connect other brands?
The city guide, TimeOut publishes a magazine and guidebooks covering events and attractions from all around the world. With the help of Amazon’s Alexa, TimeOut has helped users to ask questions about the content published by the guide. In fact, developers have updated the top 3 things to do on a particular day in the city.
Nova Effect is an app, which helps parents to tell a story in a deeper and special way. While listening to the story, the app plays the theme music and gives the sound effects that are relevant to that story.
Johnny Walker, the whiskey brand, has uniquely introduced Alexa by asking several questions about user preferences and the tool recommends the right whiskey for their taste.
Tide, the detergent brand is using Alexa to help people remove stains from the laundry. Here, the voice interface helps users to clean different types of stains by giving a step by step instructions when the user's hands are full (and untidy). Tide’s skill delivers the instructions in an extremely user-friendly format thus helping to promote the brand.
The voice interface renders help to the people with physical disabilities and assists them to use voice commands by dictating words into text documents.
The software can capture your speech, which is significantly faster than what you might normally type thus saving time.
The medical sector has a significant impact since the physicians find it very helpful to file documents directly into the patient’s Electronic Health Record. Moreover, the built-in wide-ranging medical vocabulary is a noteworthy feature as well.
Be Ready for the growth of Voice Recognition:
We can now predict the online searches will expressively change as billions of dollars are channelled into the AI sector. Surely, Virtual Assistants are fast becoming a part of everyday life.
Voice search stands as a giant entity as of today. The sight of commuters sitting and burying their heads into smartphones could soon be spoken to. Either way, chat is coming back but in a strange way.
By understanding the smart devices, we can gain intuitions into how we may need to become accustomed to our web search in this new internet world.
Conclusion
Voice technology is changing the way we interact with machines. It has given convenience a whole new meaning by simplifying the buying of goods from eCommerce portals and carrying out other activities involving a human machine interface. The use of such technologies has been adopted by leading website development company while building eCommerce portals.