Bill Scholz, president at the Applied Voice Input and Output Society (AVIOS), has said that computer speech understanding may never reach the full capabilities of humans, but it has clearly passed the level of high utility.
AVIOS is a not-for-profit private foundation that provides a forum for promoting practical applications of advanced speech technology, such as speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis and speaker authentication. In addition, it also supports technologies such as natural language interpretation and knowledge representation
The maturing of speech technology will trigger a “chain reaction” of applications that include a human-computer connection wherever we go, noted William Meisel, executive director at AVIOS.
Analysts believe the increasing use of smartphones is driving the adoption of speech recognition as well as “natural language understanding.” Apple's (News - Alert) Siri, Google Now, and Samsung S-Voice are the personal assistants that come with features to do everything for the users.
Deborah Dahl, principal at Conversational Technologies and an AVIOS board member, said that intelligent assistants will transform our interactions with technology by acting as go-betweens between us and the applications and devices in our environments.
“The uniform speech and natural language-based user interface provided by personal assistants means that we won't have to learn how to interact with every software application and consumer device individually,” she said, adding that the intelligent assistant will interpret our naturally spoken requests and take care of the details.
In addition to smartphones, automobiles are also driving the increasing adoption of voice technology. Thomas Schalk, an AVIOS board member and vice-president of Voice Technology at Agero, said that the most critical role that speech plays is “text entry” while driving.
In a user-interface, voice interaction is no longer a standalone feature. Nava Shaked, principal at Brit Business Technologies and AVIOS board member, said that spoken language understanding technologies are now being integrated with other multimodal technologies to create a holistic user experience where it is possible to maximize speech for the tasks it best fits.
With the help of speech-recognition, especially natural language, companies are offering a much improved customer service, according to Bruce Pollock, AVIOS board member and vice-president at West Interactive (News - Alert)
A well-designed speech system helps to improve self-service resolution, and also helps to ensure that if a caller needs to get to an agent, they are transferred quickly and easily to the most suitable agent to get help, Pollock said.
Earlier this year, Bill Scholz said that the explosive growth of smartphones is indicative of the desire to have “the resources of computer intelligence and the Internet always with us.”