- Reaction score
- 1,694
There’s a problem with today’s voice recognition systems: They’re just too slow. Anyone who has waited in frustration while Siri or Google’s Voice Search “thinks” about even the simplest commands knows what I’m talking about.
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The problem isn’t voice recognition software per se, which is more accurate than ever. The problem is that voice recognition is still a challenging enough problem, computationally, that all the major consumer platforms that do it—whether built by Google, Apple or Microsoft with the new Xbox—must send a compressed recording of your voice to servers hundreds or thousands of miles away. There, computers more powerful than your phone or game console transform it into text or a command. It’s that round trip, especially on slower cellular connections, that make voice recognition on most devices so slow.
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Update: To clarify, Google has had offline voice recognition since Android 4.1, but it’s still in the experimental phase and isn’t available to non-Google developers of apps. In addition, Scott Huffman, head of the Conversation Search group at Google recently told me that while Android can do some offline processing of voice commands, it’s much less accurate than what Google can accomplish when it sends your voice to the cloud.
Read more here. (Quartz)
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The problem isn’t voice recognition software per se, which is more accurate than ever. The problem is that voice recognition is still a challenging enough problem, computationally, that all the major consumer platforms that do it—whether built by Google, Apple or Microsoft with the new Xbox—must send a compressed recording of your voice to servers hundreds or thousands of miles away. There, computers more powerful than your phone or game console transform it into text or a command. It’s that round trip, especially on slower cellular connections, that make voice recognition on most devices so slow.
1
Update: To clarify, Google has had offline voice recognition since Android 4.1, but it’s still in the experimental phase and isn’t available to non-Google developers of apps. In addition, Scott Huffman, head of the Conversation Search group at Google recently told me that while Android can do some offline processing of voice commands, it’s much less accurate than what Google can accomplish when it sends your voice to the cloud.
Read more here. (Quartz)
