News & Trends The Siri Effect Why natural voice recognition changes everything. by Ned Smith, BusinessNewsDaily Senior Writer When Tim Cook introduced the iPhone 4S, it quickly became evident that the star of the show was not the phone itself, but Siri, the device’s new speech-controlled personal assistant. Unlike traditional voice-recognition (VR) software, Siri doesn’t make you bark commands; it understands natural language—the language we use to navigate the world. This giant step in the evolution of the way humans and machines communicate has the power to rock our world, both for users and companies. Even Microsoft, Apple’s arch-competitor in Redmond, WA, gives the devil his due and praises what Apple has done to raise the profile for devices with a natural user interface (NUI), such as Siri. Natural User Interface “Apple has done a great job capturing the public imagination,” said Ilya Bukshteyn, senior director of sales and marketing with Microsoft’s Tellme group. “We’re really happy to see Apple help shift the experience and get over the barrier to using natural user interfaces.” Apple is far from the only game in town. Microsoft has advanced voice- and gesture-recognition functionality baked into its Windows 7, Xbox Kinect, and new Windows Phone 7.5 software. The company’s Tellme speech-recognition platform is being incorporated in products spanning automobiles, mobile devices, gaming, and personal productivity technology. Siri-like apps for Android, such as Speaktoit Assistant, are also helping to spread the NUI word. And software developers are waiting in the wings for Apple to open Siri’s application program interface to the outside world so they can begin creating complementary apps. “Talking personal assistants is a new generation of user interface,” said Ilya Apple’s voice-recognition software, Siri, understands and responds to natural-language questions. Gelfenbeyn, founder of Speaktoit. “In the past, we used command line and graphical interfaces and are now starting to explore opportunities to speak naturally to the computer. This is the most natural way for people to communicate.” Genie in a Bottle Unlike earlier voice-recognition applications, which users quickly came to hate for their obtuseness when faced with normal human speech, Siri and other new applications understand natural speech. It’s an amalgam of speech-recognition algorithms with a hint of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing blended in, all connected to apps on your device or databases around the web such as Bing, Google, or Yelp, which have the information you’re looking for. Tap the new iPhone and you enter a world of instant information and interaction. You ask Siri questions and she gives you answers. But you don’t have to remember keywords and use specific commands. You can use her to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls and <strong>fire</strong> up applications. And like a flesh-and-blood human assistant, she becomes more helpful as she gets to know you better. “When using Siri today, it feels magical about 65 percent of the time,” said Chris Ulm, CEO of Appy Entertainment, a game developer for iPhone and iPad. “It really seems to understand natural speech, and when it does what you want—like turning on ‘American Idiot’ on your phone or setting a reminder for stopping by the market on the way home—it starts to feel like a genie in a bottle. As Siri is used, it will start to be patched and steadily improved so that magical feeling will be 95 percent of the time.” User Friendliness In terms of user-friendliness, natural voice recognition is a quantum leap ahead of the early VR apps, which users quickly came to hate and abandon. “What sets Apple’s efforts apart from what has gone before is that I don’t have to learn commands,” said Michael Gartenberg, research director for Gartner, the IT research firm. “It uses natural language processing and has enough connection to external databases. It lives up to the demos and hype and makes life easier.” Consumer acceptance for voicerecognition applications was a long time coming. Users were easily frustrated by cumbersome limitations. Because they quickly abandoned apps that didn’t provide good results, they also didn’t provide the kind of user data that developers needed to improve the quality of the apps. “Speech recognition had a hard time getting traction with users,” Microsoft’s Bukshteyn said. “On day one it was as good as it would get. I had to train myself, and the failure rate was pretty high. Users would try it at most three times. The industry was stuck in a vicious cycle.” Adoption was also stymied by this fact 14 Laptop | January 2012 www.laptopmag.com
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