Voice Command Technology Soon to be Common Place

If you’ve ever watched Minority Report or an episode of Star Trek you will no doubt have witnessed the sophisticated and futuristic technology we know as “voice commands”. Of course, that it was in Star Trek suggests that it isn’t so very futuristic, and in fact speech technology has been around since the 50’s, though in a very ineffective state.

For a long time now people have struggled with bringing speech recognition technology to the forefront. But only recently have computers reached a position where they are powerful enough to run the complex algorithms that are necessary to perfectly – or at least close to perfectly – identify what the speaker has said.

Too many times has a comedy shown one of its leads attempting to voice dial someone, only to end up dialing their mother, when they were ringing Susan.

But speech technology is not simply restricted to identifying who you want to call or whether you want your oven to be hot or just warm. Speech technology, in the future, will play a part in law enforcement and in the military, as well as give back a measure of freedom to those without the range of movement many of us take for granted.

Take for example speech to text software, which over the past decade has continued to grow more and more accurate. For a quadriplegic who had given up ever writing an email or book by her of his self, voice to speech technology could bring back that opportunity.

And computer scientists continue to develop speech recognition technology to enhance its uses. Not only will this software be able to identify who is talking by their individual vocal characteristics, but they will also allow people to know whether someone is lying, nervous, or hiding something.

Much of the more technical aspects are a long way off, as scientists continue to hone and perfect the programming behind the technology. But this early in to the 21st century, and already voice activated computers and voice dictation are becoming more and more common. Here we come Star Trek!

Posted by Josh Hill.