With the many talking bots available – Amazon’s Alexa on Echo, Apple’s Siri on HomePod, Microsoft’s Cortana on Invoke, and Google Assistant on Google Home – we can have a conversation with a machine. We know that machines do not have human intelligence; Allan Turing argued in the last century that machines cannot think. Nevertheless, it appears that machines understand what they hear.
The disruptive driver of talking machines is AI’s Voice Recognition capability, the newest technology in recognizing spoken words transcribed into texts that “know” a person’s voice with 95% accuracy, according to Analytics Insight [1]. Text is likewise translated into voice. The analytic comScore company predicts that 50% of all searches will use voice technologies. Amazon alone with its Alexa has over 25,500 voice apps to date, known as skills, whereby people build chat bots; the FAAMG line up in descending order. Analytics Insight claims that the voice recognition industry will hit over $55 billion by 2024 (ibid) with transcription applications second only to text and video. This industry is already in use by the medical and law enforcement industries with journalism and education trying it out (Ibid).
“Motivation from users for intelligent personal assistants using a voice interface has never been higher. According to the 2016 KPCB Internet Trends Report, more than 60% of respondents use voice when their hands are occupied. Research company Gartner, states that by 2018, 30% of all interactions with devices will be voice-based, because people can speak up to four times faster than they can type.” (Arm – The New Voice of Embedded Intelligent Assistant [2])
Vocalid.AI defines voice.ai as the application of state-of-the-art machine learning to speech blending algorithms to transform human voice recordings into the digital voices brands need today. Today’s voices are expressive and diverse, no longer the robotic speech we’d come to associate with a synthesized voice. It is a way to empower brands and talent to augment their current capabilities to meet the changing demands of the voice-first revolution and provide consumers with better Voice Experiences.
Voice.AI then appears to promise customers that bots like Alexa can do information search rather than having to engage browsers, a slower search engine. These voice ‘butlers’ “will become the new age gatekeepers … in the smart speaker market.” (Analytics Insight – ibid)
“Giving Voice and Vision to Artificial Intelligence, Arm technologies enable the world’s most popular AI platform — the smartphone — supporting machine learning (ML) features like predictive text, speech recognition, and computational photography. We’re also enabling newer AI platforms and AI applications, like voice assistants and consumer robots that are revolutionizing how people interact with technology and the way technology interacts with the world.” (Arm.com – ibid)
Those who make ominous predictions about Artificial Intelligence someday outsmarting human intelligence don’t hesitate to talk to a machine that seems to know more than they do. We already live in the age of the AI Fourth Industrial Revolution with quite intelligent machines.
1 https://www.analyticsinsight.net/how-artificial-intelligence-is-disrupting-speech-recognition/
2 https://vocalid.ai/category/voice-ai/
