The race to voice search
Right now it seems like the two big IT companies (Google and Microsoft) are racing towards the voice search market using speech recognition. There was an interesting article on the Wall Street Journal today talking about what each are attempting to accomplish in this area. They both really see the necessity to have an automated 411 service. Microsoft’s spin is that there is a mobile application attached to it which will give you a display on your mobile phone. Am I just missing something here, or is the vision very limited? There is a quote from the Yahoo VP who seems to realize the importance of voice technology in mobile space:
“We do believe that voice technology in the mobile space will play a very important role,” said Marco Boerries, who holds the title at Yahoo of senior vice president for connected life.
As mobile phones and other portable devices become adopted more and more by users, their functionality is starting to bridge and combine with other products. The iPhone is an example of this (phone + iPod), and I think that eventually cell phones will be like a mini-computer. Who wants to carry around a specific device for everything? Not me! Who knows…soon I might be able to write code and compile it on my phone (maybe a Visual Studio Mobile Edition?) or remote desktop into my server to fix a bug. Right now the mobile space seems limitless! There’s obviously a dependency to the mobile hardware available which limits the kind of software being created, but the hardware is getting better every day. This is all very exciting to me, thinking about the possibilities that AudioDizer has to lend a hand in this movement. At the moment I sync my mobile phone to my podcasts and listen to them, and I think it’s great.
The only thing in question here is how will people like the service. Will it recognize what they say right away, or will they have to repeat themselves until they just give up? Also, the tolerance for speech automation is still in question. We at AudioDizer have tried to make the experience as close as listening to a real news cast so that it is similar to what people hear everyday from the TV, radio or other podcasts. People want to think they are listening to a real person. Who would want to listen to something in the voice of Dr. Sbaitso? Not me! It will be interesting to see what kind of voices Google and Microsoft use to communicate back to the user and if it is tolerable.