I rather enjoyed reading this article titled Rest in Peas, which may strike you as unintelligible to you until you realize that it is a play on words about speech recognition, which the article is about. I considered speech recognition as one of those futuristic technologies thanks to Star Trek, but as I grew older, I realized that dictation was never going to be a “real” way to use a computer. I can just type so much quicker than I can dictate (plus it’s easier to correct mistakes).

Rest in Peas does a brief survey of the history of speech recognition, perfect for the layman, and the outlines the problem with the field.

Originally, however, speech recognition was going to lead to artificial intelligence. Computing pioneer Alan Turing suggested in 1950 that we “provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English.” Over half a century later, artificial intelligence has become prerequisite to understanding speech. We have neither the chicken nor the egg.

Basically, we reached a plateau of 80% accuracy, which is not nearly enough. Imagine trying to communicate with your computer as if they were a new immigrant.

But I don’t think the field is nearly as bad as they make it out to be, there are a lot of working applications already. When you call Rogers or Bell, you already talk to a female robot which understands your rudimentary instructions, and Google has some impressive voice searching capabilities for some time. Maybe the expectation of operating computers with your voice is just too far fetched. We should focus on psychic computing instead anyways.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: research