CES 2017: The year of voice — from J. Walter Thompson Intelligence by Sheperd Laughlin
Improvements in natural language processing have set the stage for a revolution in how we interact with tech.
Excerpt:
Over the past several decades, the proliferation of screens and “screen time” has been practically synonymous technology’s ever-expanding role in our lives. But this year’s CES highlights a shift in how we interact with computers: more and more, we’re bypassing screens altogether through the medium of voice.
Shawn DuBravac, chief economist of the Consumer Technology Association, said that 2017 represented an inflection point in computers’ ability to translate speech into text. When such experiments first began in 1994, he said, their error rate was about 100%. As recently as 2013, computers failed to accurately transcribe 23% of human speech.
But in 2017, they will reach parity with humans, understanding what we say at least 94% of the time. “We’re ushering in an entirely new era of faceless computing,” DuBravac said.
Addendum on 2/23/17:
- MIT develops a speech recognition chip that uses a fraction of the power of existing technologies — from techcrunch.com by Brian Heater