Whoever thought summer days were slow and lazy clearly wasn’t reading the Technology section.
It’s been only a month since our latest industry update, and already the news overfloweth. Multiple times per week, there is a very big development in A.I., natural language understanding, voice interface design, or speech recognition. Given the pace, it can be hard to keep up, so here are some highlights from the past month:
The days of laughing at inane Google Voice transcriptions are over. After feeding users’ volunteered voicemails into a neural network, Google succeeded in slashing transcription errors by a whopping 49%.
Transcribed voicemail is also arriving on-the-scene at Apple, with Siri converting spoken messages into text and also (if enabled) playing operator, letting callers know where you are and why you couldn’t pick up the phone.
Two data points here:
- People hate listening to voicemail (but you probably knew that).
- Speech recognition is growing more and more reliable, even in cases of background noise (common in voicemail).
In other news, voice-reliant hardware is on the rise! The small-screened Apple Watch, infamously fickle for touch-based input, has already beat the original iPhone and iPad in Q1 sales, with a likely $1 billion in revenue. As this platform and other small-screened and screen-less devices grow in prevalence, companies will rush in greater numbers to add voice functionality to their products.
Microsoft has stated that it sees voice as a long-term investment. Windows 10, released last week, brings Cortana to the fore. According to CNet, the company believes Cortana will be around for decades, providing a natural way to interface with newly emerging technologies.
Intelligent assistants have been blowing up this month! On July 14th, Amazon’s Echo was released to consumers at large, and the GUI-less, speech-dependent device has been garnering mostly favorable reviews. A few weeks later, Amazon opened up the Alexa Voice Service to hardware makers and developers who want Alexa living on their devices. (Interested in how MindMeld and Alexa differ? A blog post is forthcoming.)
Facebook will be making its own entry into the virtual assistant marketplace with Moneypenny, a virtual helper that works much like Fetch, connecting users to real people for help with making purchases and booking services.
As always, the MindMeld team has been hard at work. Recent enhancements have brought a leap in information retrieval accuracy! More on that, too, to come.
