2008-01-07

Not Everyone Wants Speech Recognition - Gethuman.com

David Hull @ "Field Notes on the Web" is not fully taken with Speech Recognition and he does have a point

...I'm not sure speech is going to take over as completely as one might think. Why do people send text with cell phones? One would be hard-pressed to imagine a more tortuous way of producing text than to thumb it in on a tiny numeric pad, especially before word recognition, but people did, and do, even when they could call, or leave a voice mail.

He's right - Texting was the new way to communicate seasonal greetings this year:

About 65 million texts were sent through O2 on Christmas Day...
The three largest mobile phone service providers in the country said more than 62 million messages were sent on December 24 and 25 - five million more than in 2006.
Swisscom counted more than 25 million electronic messages on its network, with a little over half sent on Christmas Eve.....
One billion text messages are sent every week in the UK....
The Mobile Data Association (MDA) today announced that 4,825 billion messages were sent during September 2007, an average of over 1.2 billion messages every week, staggeringly, the same number of messages sent during the whole of 1999

Anyway - I digress. Speech Recognition is not going to replace all other forms of data capture with technology but it is going to become more pervasive. There are lots of reasons why you might not want to use speech to interact with technology:

Personally I would prefer not to talk to my computer much of the time, either because the environment is noisy (playing havoc with accuracy), or because it's quiet (and I don't want to disturb anyone), or because there's someone else in the room I might like to talk to without confusing the UI.

In short, speech recognition is useful now (particularly if typing is difficult or impossible for a person) and will continue to become more useful as the technology continues to improve, but I don't see it taking over the world.

That said it is already in use on many verbal exchanges taking place today. At least one government (with participation from at least another 3 or more) is listening in in the form of Echelon (allegedly) . And we are increasingly being connected to voice recognition systems on the phone. ON on that point - there are times when it works and it is better but many times the system is so poorly designed and treats the customer/individual poorly we all just want to get to a real human being....enter gethuman.com a site that was set up by Paul English. He's a successful entrepreneur - if I remember correctly he described himself as a serial entrepreneur (Boston Light Software and Kayak) and a philanthropist - a real gentleman.

If you get frustrated with the speech systems online check this site out - it provides you with the quickest way to ....... get a human being.


Labels: , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home