Voice recognition technology has finally reached a level of sophistication matching the precision and native awareness of human transcription! Just check out the level of unbelievable naturalness offered by Google Voice, the search giant’s flagship automated voicemail transcription service-
“Hi Oleg, My name is patio and I got your message for focal stuff I’m selling,
please give me a call back… my number is XXXXXXXXX18 Thank God.”
As computer use becomes ubiquitous, it is increasingly desirable to communicate with them in the same way that we communicate with one another: using human speech. Voice or Speech Recognition technology aims to do just this. Personally, I fell in love with the concept of voice recognition ever since I first saw “Star Trek, The New Generation” series. Unfortunately, my first attempt at making a productive use of speech recognition in Microsoft Windows 3.1 was rather disappointing.
Today our ability to use voice recognition is limited to issuing system commands to speed up familiar functions. So what prevents us from talking to our personal computers and phone systems (those are quickly converging into one) ? What you may not realize is that speech recognition is a rather complicated and resource intensive task.
Humans easily and efficiently relay information via speech despite many complications, including background noise, slips related to spontaneous speech (stammers, filled pauses, false starts, etc.) and the inherent variability of human speech.