SpinVox, a British company that converts voicemails into text with speech recognition technology, has been accused by the BBC of using humans at call centers to manually conduct the majority of the translations.
This spring marked the 40th anniversary of HAL, the conversational computer that was brought to life in the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Forty years after “2001,” how close are we to talking to a computer? Current applications of speech technology are a far cry from HAL.
Bill Gates has been an incredibly successful businessman, but that doesn’t mean he’s particularly good at predicting the future of technology. Remember his claim that spam would be gone within two years … which he made in 2004? However, if there’s one prognostication that Gates just can’t let go of, it’s his belief that speech recognition will replace keyboards as the preferred input device for computers. He’s been saying it for years and years and years, without much to show for it.
Innovation usually needs time to steep. Time to turn the idea into something tangible, time to get it to market, time for people to decide they accept it. Speech recognition technology has steeped for a long time: Mike Phillips remembers that in the 1980s, when he was a Carnegie Mellon graduate student trying to develop rudimentary speech-recognition systems, “it seemed almost impossible.” Now, devices that incorporate speech recognition are starting to hit the mass market, thanks to entrepreneurs like Phillips.
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