6 ms·

The Rise of Voice Interfaces

33 points by pmcpinto 11y ago

douche 11y ago
Hate people typing on noisy mechanical keyboards? You're going to love everyone babbling into their devices all the time. I really don't want to talk to my computer/phone/coffee pot/house. I would rather that software have its normal interface polished and made closer to something that is usable, than have another UI paradigm bolted on that is going to be badly implemented 80% of the time by application developers.
- Labyrinth 11y ago
  To add on to that most of the voice enabled apps have trouble even recognizing speech when it comes to different dialects of English. For example, Southern dialect, "I am fixing to go to the bar, are you ready" would translate to "I am fixing the bar are you there yet?".
  - kylebgorman 11y ago
    Plenty of technology exists for adaptation to speaker and/or dialect, it's just not considered particularly sexy. To phrase it in economic terms, you can spend your time doing algorithmic work to improve recognition slightly for your existing English users, or you could just deploy a new system for the 70 million or so affluent, tech-literate South Koreans or the maybe a half a billion or so upwardly mobile Hindi/Urdu speakers. But, give it a little time and you can expect that authenticated users will be getting speaker adaptation.
- melling 11y ago
  Not me, I want Jarvis. I've been waiting 4 decades for it. I grew up watching Star Trek. I want the future that I was promised.
  - seiji 11y ago
    I want Jarvis. "We were promised Jarvis, but all we got were eight different closed-source, non-extensible, hosted voice recognition platforms." What are the leading voice recognition assistant thingies? Siri, Google Now (no human name, much like most google employees), Cortana, Alexis? They each have huge acoustic models and run completely privately and are completely closed source. We can't have Jarvis until we run our own hackable computing infrastructures personally, not globally hosted versions running behind the walls of Trust Us, Inc. Which mobile platform will be the first to offer pluggable voice-to-action backends? Much like we pick web browsers, we should be able to select our voice command interfaces, but that would require a lot more interop between hardware manufactures and would also kill their moats of unlimited training data acquisition.
    - melling 11y ago
      Once it becomes a solved problem then someone can write the gnu or open source version. I thought that was obvious? There's already an open source project. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Sphinx https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Sphinx The others are leading because they are putting more time and money into their respective projects.
      - seiji 11y ago
        Solved "problem" with a petabyte of training data and 18,000 GPUs to train the model. :-\
- falcolas 11y ago
  With a throat mike, you could theoretically talk to your computer at a volume someone next to you could not hear. I think voice interaction is inevitable - we can simply transfer information faster via vocal interactions than we can the keyboard or mouse (save for a few very fast typists or stenographers).
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Ten years ago, DARPA was working on a sensor that could detect non-acoustic speech under their Advanced Speech Encoding project. Doesn't seem to have had any (publicly available) results, though.
    - cmaury 11y ago
      This has been commercialized. I'm not sure if it's based on the same research, but you can find it here: www.theaudeo.com (site currently down, but it was up a couple of weeks ago).
      - icebraining 11y ago
        Found it on the Web Archive[1], sounds like the same kind of mechanism, yeah. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150330030801/http://www.theaudeo.com/?action=technology https://web.archive.org/web/20150330030801/http://www.theaud...
roel_v 11y ago
I've been thinking about voice interfaces for home automation lately as I've been tinkering with my HA setup, so let me slightly highjack this topic: does anyone have an idea of how to set up a system where you don't have to talk directly into a microphone to get a computer to do stuff? Most current applications (e.g. voxcommando) take care of the 'speech recognition' part just fine, but I don't want to have to go hunt for my phone to turn on the light - I just want to say 'computer turn on light' and have it 'hear' me all the time. But I don't want mics in every corner either, of course. So a sensitive mic per room, preferably one I could put deploy in severval ways (just put it down, hang at the wall, powered from mains or batteries, ...) that would send whatever it picks up to a central processing server seems the way to go. Do such things exist? And beyond the hardware, how does one tackle e.g. the privacy problem of having everything you say recorded all the time? I'd love to have a way to say 'computer lights off' when I'm in bed just before I go to sleep, but for obvious reasons I'm hesitant to open myself up to the possibility that any dude with a high-gain antenna would be able to listen in on any sound made there...
- ganarajpr 11y ago
  I have a radical suggestion for your problem :).. Buy one of those cute robots in the house things.. Have the user speak to these robots instead of generally speaking into the room.. It feels a lot more natural for human beings and feels less weird since you wont have a feeling of talking to an evil bot that lives in the ether and knows everything about you.
- jewel 11y ago
  You can use something like jasper, which is open source and can run on a raspberry pi. You don't need to have it connected to the Internet at all, you could put your home automation and the pi on its own ethernet, not connected to the rest of the world. There's nothing like an air gap. If you had multiple microphones it might make sense to have one bulkier computer instead of having a pi in each room, but I haven't looked into how much CPU it takes jasper to listen for its wake-up word. https://jasperproject.github.io/ https://jasperproject.github.io/
  - 11y ago
wahsd 11y ago
There are so many things wrong with this article. Not even mentioning that, unless I am totally screwing up as I am on 0% coffee, the Space Needle is nowhere near Washington DC. I have a feeling we are going to head into a new era of hype and bubble that is far less defined by hardware, but more by constant promises and probably frequent disappointment about the value of virtual assistants.
netcan 11y ago
A UI is basically a trade tongue. We don't speak machine and machines don't speak human. A UI is a least common denominator that everyone can learn quickly. But it's nowhere near native quality. You can't get much more than simple one liners in trade talk. Good enough for negotiating a chest of cloves, but you'd be hard pressed to explain the difference between marxist-leninist and labour socialist perspectives on international commerce in a trade tongue. When people hear "voice interface" what they think is a machine that can understand human so we can stop speaking goddamned pidgin all day. That is essentially a turing test, or some subspecies thereof. I'm somewhat skeptical about this kind of thing. I'm confident that mechanical issues like translating sounds to sentences can be solved (the voice part). The translation of human to machine code… That's a different challenge. It's an interesting case though, to have out in the wild. Siri and whatnot. An application (as opposed to an average starship computer) has a limited raison d'être, therefor a much tighter search space. Meanwhile, we have been making consistent progress on turning our clunky pidgins into nice creoles, more elegant and powerful. Machines can understand higher level programming languages that people can get more fluent in. Average humans are generally becoming more computer literate (or fluent in UI, to keep my analogy straight). UIs are getting more intuitive, which basically means closer to human language. The common ground is expanding from just common ground and a wider language is being developed that accommodates us both better. The question to answer is what part of that common ground is voice is open, I guess. But, I would wager that the common ground we find will not be human sounding anytime soon. It will be a UI metaphor, like the desktop. We will need to learn it.
- wanderfowl 11y ago
  This is a really well put explanation of why the natural language processing side is hard, but it assumes that we can even get letters and words into the system. I'm a linguist who works on speech perception, and I'm increasingly convinced that true speech-to-text, that can stand in for a human transcriptionist, is an AI-complete problem. We can get close, but you'll always need context and understanding of the world to accurately get things like "I'm going to take a walk in the park, then I'm going to take a wok from the Chinese Restaurant". Siri and whatnot are amazing, and there's room for improvement, especially on the NLP end, but these issues combined with how damned hard speech is mean that Jarvis will be a keyboard away for years to come.
32bitkid 11y ago
Until I can have a conversation with a machine–like I would a person–then I feel like voice interfaces will languish in the uncanny valley of HCI. I notice the problem the most when listening to voice commands from a GPS; there are times when the computer gives me an instruction, and I really want to say , "That's not going to happen." It would be nice if it could pre-emptively start to recompute–like a person navigator would–rather than wait until the GPS detects that I'm not on the course that it thinks I'm going to be on to make a correction that will essentially go the same way. But we can't have a _conversation_; just an exchange of commands. The machine tells the meatbag to do something, the meatbag tells the machine to do something. Tangentially, I don't _really_ want voice interfaces like in Star Trek/Jarvis; I want a digital doppelgänger. Something that can act on my behalf and convincingly sound/act/respond like I would. I don't want to talk to a machines more, I want to talk to other humans less.
rasz_pl 11y ago
Show me to buy milk at this opportunity!

33 points by pmcpinto 11y ago

Hate people typing on noisy mechanical keyboards? You're going to love everyone babbling into their devices all the time. I really don't want to talk to my computer/phone/coffee pot/house. I would rather that software have its normal interface polished and made closer to something that is usable, than have another UI paradigm bolted on that is going to be badly implemented 80% of the time by application developers.

Labyrinth 11y ago
To add on to that most of the voice enabled apps have trouble even recognizing speech when it comes to different dialects of English. For example, Southern dialect, "I am fixing to go to the bar, are you ready" would translate to "I am fixing the bar are you there yet?".
- kylebgorman 11y ago
  Plenty of technology exists for adaptation to speaker and/or dialect, it's just not considered particularly sexy. To phrase it in economic terms, you can spend your time doing algorithmic work to improve recognition slightly for your existing English users, or you could just deploy a new system for the 70 million or so affluent, tech-literate South Koreans or the maybe a half a billion or so upwardly mobile Hindi/Urdu speakers. But, give it a little time and you can expect that authenticated users will be getting speaker adaptation.
melling 11y ago
Not me, I want Jarvis. I've been waiting 4 decades for it. I grew up watching Star Trek. I want the future that I was promised.
- seiji 11y ago
  I want Jarvis. "We were promised Jarvis, but all we got were eight different closed-source, non-extensible, hosted voice recognition platforms." What are the leading voice recognition assistant thingies? Siri, Google Now (no human name, much like most google employees), Cortana, Alexis? They each have huge acoustic models and run completely privately and are completely closed source. We can't have Jarvis until we run our own hackable computing infrastructures personally, not globally hosted versions running behind the walls of Trust Us, Inc. Which mobile platform will be the first to offer pluggable voice-to-action backends? Much like we pick web browsers, we should be able to select our voice command interfaces, but that would require a lot more interop between hardware manufactures and would also kill their moats of unlimited training data acquisition.
  - melling 11y ago
    Once it becomes a solved problem then someone can write the gnu or open source version. I thought that was obvious? There's already an open source project. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Sphinx https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Sphinx The others are leading because they are putting more time and money into their respective projects.
    - seiji 11y ago
      Solved "problem" with a petabyte of training data and 18,000 GPUs to train the model. :-\
falcolas 11y ago
With a throat mike, you could theoretically talk to your computer at a volume someone next to you could not hear. I think voice interaction is inevitable - we can simply transfer information faster via vocal interactions than we can the keyboard or mouse (save for a few very fast typists or stenographers).
- icebraining 11y ago
  Ten years ago, DARPA was working on a sensor that could detect non-acoustic speech under their Advanced Speech Encoding project. Doesn't seem to have had any (publicly available) results, though.
  - cmaury 11y ago
    This has been commercialized. I'm not sure if it's based on the same research, but you can find it here: www.theaudeo.com (site currently down, but it was up a couple of weeks ago).
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Found it on the Web Archive[1], sounds like the same kind of mechanism, yeah. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150330030801/http://www.theaudeo.com/?action=technology https://web.archive.org/web/20150330030801/http://www.theaud...

roel_v 11y ago

I've been thinking about voice interfaces for home automation lately as I've been tinkering with my HA setup, so let me slightly highjack this topic: does anyone have an idea of how to set up a system where you don't have to talk directly into a microphone to get a computer to do stuff? Most current applications (e.g. voxcommando) take care of the 'speech recognition' part just fine, but I don't want to have to go hunt for my phone to turn on the light - I just want to say 'computer turn on light' and have it 'hear' me all the time. But I don't want mics in every corner either, of course. So a sensitive mic per room, preferably one I could put deploy in severval ways (just put it down, hang at the wall, powered from mains or batteries, ...) that would send whatever it picks up to a central processing server seems the way to go. Do such things exist? And beyond the hardware, how does one tackle e.g. the privacy problem of having everything you say recorded all the time? I'd love to have a way to say 'computer lights off' when I'm in bed just before I go to sleep, but for obvious reasons I'm hesitant to open myself up to the possibility that any dude with a high-gain antenna would be able to listen in on any sound made there...

ganarajpr 11y ago
I have a radical suggestion for your problem :).. Buy one of those cute robots in the house things.. Have the user speak to these robots instead of generally speaking into the room.. It feels a lot more natural for human beings and feels less weird since you wont have a feeling of talking to an evil bot that lives in the ether and knows everything about you.
jewel 11y ago
You can use something like jasper, which is open source and can run on a raspberry pi. You don't need to have it connected to the Internet at all, you could put your home automation and the pi on its own ethernet, not connected to the rest of the world. There's nothing like an air gap. If you had multiple microphones it might make sense to have one bulkier computer instead of having a pi in each room, but I haven't looked into how much CPU it takes jasper to listen for its wake-up word. https://jasperproject.github.io/ https://jasperproject.github.io/
- 11y ago

wahsd 11y ago

There are so many things wrong with this article. Not even mentioning that, unless I am totally screwing up as I am on 0% coffee, the Space Needle is nowhere near Washington DC. I have a feeling we are going to head into a new era of hype and bubble that is far less defined by hardware, but more by constant promises and probably frequent disappointment about the value of virtual assistants.

netcan 11y ago

A UI is basically a trade tongue. We don't speak machine and machines don't speak human. A UI is a least common denominator that everyone can learn quickly. But it's nowhere near native quality. You can't get much more than simple one liners in trade talk. Good enough for negotiating a chest of cloves, but you'd be hard pressed to explain the difference between marxist-leninist and labour socialist perspectives on international commerce in a trade tongue. When people hear "voice interface" what they think is a machine that can understand human so we can stop speaking goddamned pidgin all day. That is essentially a turing test, or some subspecies thereof. I'm somewhat skeptical about this kind of thing. I'm confident that mechanical issues like translating sounds to sentences can be solved (the voice part). The translation of human to machine code… That's a different challenge. It's an interesting case though, to have out in the wild. Siri and whatnot. An application (as opposed to an average starship computer) has a limited raison d'être, therefor a much tighter search space. Meanwhile, we have been making consistent progress on turning our clunky pidgins into nice creoles, more elegant and powerful. Machines can understand higher level programming languages that people can get more fluent in. Average humans are generally becoming more computer literate (or fluent in UI, to keep my analogy straight). UIs are getting more intuitive, which basically means closer to human language. The common ground is expanding from just common ground and a wider language is being developed that accommodates us both better. The question to answer is what part of that common ground is voice is open, I guess. But, I would wager that the common ground we find will not be human sounding anytime soon. It will be a UI metaphor, like the desktop. We will need to learn it.

wanderfowl 11y ago
This is a really well put explanation of why the natural language processing side is hard, but it assumes that we can even get letters and words into the system. I'm a linguist who works on speech perception, and I'm increasingly convinced that true speech-to-text, that can stand in for a human transcriptionist, is an AI-complete problem. We can get close, but you'll always need context and understanding of the world to accurately get things like "I'm going to take a walk in the park, then I'm going to take a wok from the Chinese Restaurant". Siri and whatnot are amazing, and there's room for improvement, especially on the NLP end, but these issues combined with how damned hard speech is mean that Jarvis will be a keyboard away for years to come.

32bitkid 11y ago

Until I can have a conversation with a machine–like I would a person–then I feel like voice interfaces will languish in the uncanny valley of HCI. I notice the problem the most when listening to voice commands from a GPS; there are times when the computer gives me an instruction, and I really want to say , "That's not going to happen." It would be nice if it could pre-emptively start to recompute–like a person navigator would–rather than wait until the GPS detects that I'm not on the course that it thinks I'm going to be on to make a correction that will essentially go the same way. But we can't have a _conversation_; just an exchange of commands. The machine tells the meatbag to do something, the meatbag tells the machine to do something. Tangentially, I don't _really_ want voice interfaces like in Star Trek/Jarvis; I want a digital doppelgänger. Something that can act on my behalf and convincingly sound/act/respond like I would. I don't want to talk to a machines more, I want to talk to other humans less.

rasz_pl 11y ago

Show me to buy milk at this opportunity!