4 ms·

We can push buttons, we can touch screens, but the future will be the ability to tell computers what we want them to do with our voice. I hope this future will

We can push buttons, we can touch screens, but the future will be the ability to tell computers what we want them to do with our voice. I hope this future will come in my lifetime as much as the next guy, though so far every time I try speech-to-text and the likes of speech-command software I use it optimistically for the first few days, then give it up. Context aware software with speech recognition might be about to change all of that. And maybe it's going to take another garage startup (think Apple) to make it all fall into place. But 8 hours of work seems like too small an effort if you're wanting to compete with Siri. Essentially all they have is a glorified search engine that accepts speech instead of text and gives you a summary of one of the results. This isn't Siri, or anything close.

joebadmo 15y ago
I agree, except I think there are places for voice, and places for touch. Things that would take multiple steps to accomplish, e.g. "remind me to take out the trash when I get home," is an awesome application for voice, but for choosing from a menu of a bunch of items, I want to just select the item. My wife got a 4S, and from the few days we've been playing with it, we agree that it's sort of still in the uncanny valley of AI. It's too hard to tell what's going to work and what's not, esp. for the technically lay. It's amazing, though, for Apple to have opened everyone's eyes (ears?) once again wrt to what direction the near future will take.
- gbog 15y ago
  > direction the near future will take. It is hard to tell. I am not convinced that the near future is in natural language and voice control. I stated why here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3119528 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3119528. And the more I think of it, the less I am convinced. For instance, the hole Chinese-speaking world cannot conveniently use speech to communicate with a machine, because of Chinese language structure. If Siri do not understand an English name I am telling it, I can always "spell" it. Not in Chinese. You can't conveniently "spell" a Chinese character, and even if you could (using wubi method), you would still need a visual feedback to confirm the correct character has been chosen. Nowadays, any technology that can't scale well to other languages than English has a profound problem, I suppose.
  - hmottestad 15y ago
    Every tv-show with any amount of tech that I watched when I was a kid in the 90s featured a computer that talked and could be talked to. Plenty of people hoping this will become a reality, even if only for languages using letters (ie. not Chinese). Any complex task that is somehow generic can easily be done with voice control and makes the UI needed for simpler tasks to be more concise and less bloated. For instance setting the alarm clock. You could scroll through your apps looking for the clock app. Open it (ie. wait for it to load), then navigate to the alarm clock tab, create a new alarm, set the correct time and hit save. (on my nokia phone this is actually faster than saying saying the word "alarm", but my ipod touch is slow as hell) On a computer with a keyboard a lot of this can be sped up because I can search for the application from the keyboard, I can tab through fields and use shortcuts to do things (like ctrl-n for new). But my mum can never remember any shortcuts, and she can't type very fast. And if you think that the new generation is any better...then have a look at anyone studying in the human sciences department...most of them have trouble enough using word. My point is, if something doesn't require perfect speech recognition, is a complex yet generic task...then voice control seems like a very good solution.
tensor 15y ago
I agree that this is likely missing some pretty important pieces. Due to all the recent talk about Apple and Siri I decided to look into Siri the startup a little more closely. That's the company that Apple bought to bring you Siri the feature. I was curious how much of this technology was created by the startup and how much Apple contributed. While I didn't find the answer to that question, I did discover something even more startling. It turns out that Siri the company was born out of one of the largest computer science research programs in U.S. history. Or so claims the press release [1]. Looking at the the research project page [2], it appears to involve at least seven major universities, a lot of government funding, and several private corporate collaborators. While some of the pieces may be open, the license for the project itself only allows for non-commercial use. It's also fantastically complex and combines many state of the art techniques. While it's certainly possible for a company to reproduce much of the implementation from the open pieces, it is a lot more than 8 hours of work. All said, Siri is an amazing accomplishment, and more than anything, a great example of why science funding is important. [1] http://www.sri.com/news/releases/020510.html http://www.sri.com/news/releases/020510.html [2] https://pal.sri.com/Plone/framework https://pal.sri.com/Plone/framework

joebadmo 15y ago

I agree, except I think there are places for voice, and places for touch. Things that would take multiple steps to accomplish, e.g. "remind me to take out the trash when I get home," is an awesome application for voice, but for choosing from a menu of a bunch of items, I want to just select the item. My wife got a 4S, and from the few days we've been playing with it, we agree that it's sort of still in the uncanny valley of AI. It's too hard to tell what's going to work and what's not, esp. for the technically lay. It's amazing, though, for Apple to have opened everyone's eyes (ears?) once again wrt to what direction the near future will take.

gbog 15y ago
> direction the near future will take. It is hard to tell. I am not convinced that the near future is in natural language and voice control. I stated why here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3119528 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3119528. And the more I think of it, the less I am convinced. For instance, the hole Chinese-speaking world cannot conveniently use speech to communicate with a machine, because of Chinese language structure. If Siri do not understand an English name I am telling it, I can always "spell" it. Not in Chinese. You can't conveniently "spell" a Chinese character, and even if you could (using wubi method), you would still need a visual feedback to confirm the correct character has been chosen. Nowadays, any technology that can't scale well to other languages than English has a profound problem, I suppose.
- hmottestad 15y ago
  Every tv-show with any amount of tech that I watched when I was a kid in the 90s featured a computer that talked and could be talked to. Plenty of people hoping this will become a reality, even if only for languages using letters (ie. not Chinese). Any complex task that is somehow generic can easily be done with voice control and makes the UI needed for simpler tasks to be more concise and less bloated. For instance setting the alarm clock. You could scroll through your apps looking for the clock app. Open it (ie. wait for it to load), then navigate to the alarm clock tab, create a new alarm, set the correct time and hit save. (on my nokia phone this is actually faster than saying saying the word "alarm", but my ipod touch is slow as hell) On a computer with a keyboard a lot of this can be sped up because I can search for the application from the keyboard, I can tab through fields and use shortcuts to do things (like ctrl-n for new). But my mum can never remember any shortcuts, and she can't type very fast. And if you think that the new generation is any better...then have a look at anyone studying in the human sciences department...most of them have trouble enough using word. My point is, if something doesn't require perfect speech recognition, is a complex yet generic task...then voice control seems like a very good solution.

tensor 15y ago

I agree that this is likely missing some pretty important pieces. Due to all the recent talk about Apple and Siri I decided to look into Siri the startup a little more closely. That's the company that Apple bought to bring you Siri the feature. I was curious how much of this technology was created by the startup and how much Apple contributed. While I didn't find the answer to that question, I did discover something even more startling. It turns out that Siri the company was born out of one of the largest computer science research programs in U.S. history. Or so claims the press release [1]. Looking at the the research project page [2], it appears to involve at least seven major universities, a lot of government funding, and several private corporate collaborators. While some of the pieces may be open, the license for the project itself only allows for non-commercial use. It's also fantastically complex and combines many state of the art techniques. While it's certainly possible for a company to reproduce much of the implementation from the open pieces, it is a lot more than 8 hours of work. All said, Siri is an amazing accomplishment, and more than anything, a great example of why science funding is important. [1] http://www.sri.com/news/releases/020510.html http://www.sri.com/news/releases/020510.html [2] https://pal.sri.com/Plone/framework https://pal.sri.com/Plone/framework