Communications of the ACM
Google Is Preparing For Screenless Computers
Touch screens will be pass if Google gets its way.
Credit: Gadget Him
Google aims to fulfill its vision of a future in which people's primary interaction with computers is vocal by enabling voice commands in all of its products, and making such engagement as seamless, simple, and intuitive as current keyboard and touchscreen technology.
"What we're really trying to do is enable a new kind of interaction with Google where it's more like how you interact with a normal person," says Scott Huffman, head of Google's Conversation Search group. Realizing the level of simplicity that the group is aiming for requires leveraging Google's complete body of accumulated knowledge about the real world, he says. The primary tool for this is the Google Knowledge Graph, a database of people, places, and things. Huffman says Google seeks to apply its intimate knowledge of its users to make automatic speech recognition better than that of humans.
The Google voice interface already can comprehend pronouns like he, she, and it, but among the challenges of achieving voice-only human-computer interaction is imbuing voice control with reliability and error correction. A second challenge is the need for people to learn an entirely new computer control methodology, as well as the capabilities of the software that supports the methodology.
From Quartz
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Comments
Vinton Cerf
If we are all talking to our computers, what will the noise level be and will that interfere with speech recognition acuity?
vint
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