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It’s the future, and that being the case, you’re going to want to talk to your smartphone and have it make heads or tails of what you’re saying. Getting that to work can be a pretty tough job however, unless your phone can learn like a human. And as Wired explains, that’s exactly what Google’s Jelly Bean operating system does.
According to Google’s Vincent Vanhoucke, a researcher who was integral in wrapping “neural network” technology into Android, voice recognition errors in Jelly Bean dropped a whole 25 per cent thanks to the tech. As Vanhoucke explained to Wired:
“It really is changing the way that people behave.” …When you talk to Android’s voice recognition software, the spectrogram of what you’ve said is chopped up and sent to eight different computers housed in Google’s vast worldwide army of servers. It’s then processed, using the neural network models built by Vanhoucke and his team.
And while neural network technology is most prevalent and advanced in Jelly Bean’s voice capabilities, that’s not where the application ends. Human-like brain-learning is also super promising when it comes to better and more useful image search capability. Eventually, it could help computers recognise images as actual objects instead of just jumbles of pixels.
It’s a push towards a more intuitive style of computer-human interaction I think we can all get behind, at least until the SkyNet shows up. You can hop over to Wired to read more about it, and the awesomeness to come. [Wired]
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I speak fairly clearly with very little accent and whilst sometimes the recognition is reasonable (or very good) sometimes it’s shockingly hideous.
Ideally I’d like to be able to train it (like you can with Dragon) by reading some text or at least the most common phrases I’m likely to use.
You have to unlock the phone first before you can use the voice function, which is inconvenient if you want to call someone without taking out your phone. For example, I am walking down the street and listening to music on my Nexus 4 when I suddenly realise that I need to call someone. I have to take my phone out, unlock it, before I can activate the voice function by long pressing on the headphone button, at which point I might as well just open up the phone app and dial.
Well that’s one thing Apple managed to get right on the iPhone.