Many of you will have seen the advert for the new iPhone 4S. A man asks his phone, “How’s my day looking?” and the phone answers, “Not bad, just two meetings today.”
Then a woman asks, “Will I need an umbrella today?” and the phone assures her that the weather is set to be dry and sunny for the next two days. It seems like something out of 1980s science fiction that has become reality; does anyone remember KITT the car out of Knight Rider? What you are actually seeing (and hearing) is voice command technology in action.
Voice command is nothing new and has been around since the 1990s. One of the most visible ways it made its way into the main stream was in the 2000 Mercedes S Class which had voice command technology for the built in mobile phone. The Windows XP operating system had voice command technology available which could work with the Microsoft Office suite of products so you could dictate a document and it would type it up in Word. There have been plenty of mobile phones with voice command software available in the past decade too, but for some reason this technology has never really taken off.
The earliest problem was trying to convert a spoken word into a digital command. The S Class Mercedes was notoriously bad at this and most owners just gave up with the feature when it dialled random numbers. For computer voice command systems the solution was to create a speech recognition engine that “taught” the computer to recognise certain words, just as you can teach Word to recognise new words by adding them to the dictionary. Speech recognition software has improved considerably but it is not perfect; just try paying your credit card bill using the automated phone system and see how many times you have to repeat yourself.
The iPhone 4S seems to have moved voice command to a whole new level. Rather than translating a simple command such as “Phone Mike” into an action, the system, known as Siri, can understand a question such as “Will I need an umbrella today?” and give you the answer in the form of the weather forecast. Don’t think that Apple have just invented artificial intelligence, though; the phone is using keywords in the same way that a search engine does. When it hears akeyword such as umbrella it links it to weather and uses the relevant app to give you the forecast.
The question is how useful is this technology? After all, if you want to know the weather forecast it’s quicker and easier just to tap the weather app. Sending a text message by voice command might be useful, as might putting an appointment in your diary. Then again, if you want Mike to know you’ll be home in half an hour, why not just phone him and tell him?
My feeling is that this is a step too far, even for Apple. Yes, they’ve finally got the technology to work properly but that is not enough. Technology has to be useful before it becomes widely adopted. To have to say a sentence to achieve what you can do with the tap of a finger is not progress, it is a step backwards. The iPod was a huge success because it linked in with iTunes and made it possible for people to download any song they wanted straight to their personal stereo. The iPhone was a hit because it rolled all the available technology together into one easy to use and stylish package. The iPad worked because it recognised that people were using their laptops as a media device rather than a work tool. As with all things, only time will tell whether voice control is the next big thing.
Graham Lek
IT Consultant |
