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Communicating with Your Own Voice

November 9, 2012 •

Using Siri

With a new iPhone 5 on the Ver­i­zon LTE net­work, I’ve been exper­i­ment­ing with Siri for sim­ple tasks and infor­ma­tion requests. Get­ting dis­ap­point­ingly mixed results. Until I learned how to get the best results from Siri, I found myself wast­ing time try­ing to cor­rect Sir­i’s mis­takes. But when she works prop­erly, it’s delight­ful.

microphone iconWhat I’ve learned is that my nor­mal speak­ing voice and cadence cause Siri to make too many errors. To get the best out of Siri, I’ve had to learn to slow down, speak more sim­ply, use key­word-style dic­tion, and enun­ci­ate more clearly.

I try to avoid flow­ing sen­tences or words that sound as if they run together. As a result my inter­ac­tions with Siri sound some­what robotic, but they get the job done…

As an exam­ple of cadence prob­lems, when I asked Siri to launch the web page for Ama­zon’s wine store, Siri heard “swine,” and dis­played a Google search results page with infor­ma­tion about pigs.

When I ask Siri to find some­thing that is stored on my phone (such as con­tact or cal­en­dar info), I do so using key­words that often appear on the iPhone. So I get bet­ter results when I ask Siri to “call Dad Wilson’s home phone” rather than “call Dad.” Sadly, my take­away on how best to use Siri is that it’s yet another exam­ple of humans hav­ing to learn from the tech­nol­ogy, rather than vice versa.

That said, I’ve found dic­tat­ing text mes­sages via iMes­sage (on the iPhone or my new Mac­Book Pro) to be a lovely time-saver. The con­tent of text mes­sages is usu­ally quite sim­ple, so the lack of com­plex­ity dri­ves bet­ter results with Siri.

Net net: there are occa­sional moments of delight, clear time-savers and con­ve­niences in a nar­row domain, but the over­all results are still under­whelm­ing. Apple knows that Siri is not yet ready for prime time, so Apple posi­tions Siri as a beta prod­uct.

For­tu­nately, tech­nol­ogy lead­ers like Apple and Microsoft are hard at work to find ways that will enable us to speak more nat­u­rally to or through our devices, and get the results we expect.

Microsoft: What’s Cooking in the Lab

Microsoft Research has begun demon­strat­ing a more accu­rate, real-time speech recog­ni­tion capa­bil­ity that also lever­ages machine lan­guage trans­la­tion tech­nol­ogy. Microsoft claims this speech recog­ni­tion approach dri­ves 30% fewer mis­takes than the other tech­nolo­gies on the mar­ket today. This 10-minute video shows Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research, demon­strat­ing this tech­nol­ogy. It’s worth watch­ing to see how far they’ve come in the lab.

First you’ll see real-time tran­scrip­tion of his speech (like next-gen closed cap­tion­ing) — amaz­ingly good, but not error-free. Then you see the tech­nol­ogy trans­lat­ing Rashid’s speech into Chi­nese Man­darin; first as writ­ten lan­guage and then spo­ken lan­guage.

What’s amaz­ing is that the spo­ken ver­sion of the machine-lan­guage trans­la­tion attempts to mimic the speak­er’s nat­ural tones and cadences. Just imag­ine the improve­ments when this evolves from the lab to a com­mer­cial qual­ity prod­uct!

I think the Microsoft tech­nol­ogy demon­stra­tion gives us a peek at what the future has in store for us. A world in which we can use our own voice to more accu­rately direct our devices to carry out spe­cific task requests, as well as one that enables us to com­mu­ni­cate with other peo­ple across lan­guage bar­ri­ers.

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Reflec­tions on life, travel, books, and yoga. Think­ing out loud about the pur­suit of mind­ful­ness and well-being.

Learn­ing how to recover from the loss of a beloved spouse, and then to find a trans­for­ma­tive path for­ward.

About Me

Semi-retired marketing exec, transitioning from a career in high tech. Now "managed" by two Tonkinese cats. Missing travel and friends on the West Coast. Avid reader and foodie. Staying active with long walks, biking, kayaking and yoga.

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