Imagine a device that acts as virtual personal assistant and can answer all your questions like “How’s the weather outside ?”. Well, Apple has introduced an intelligent software based personal assistant called “Siri” on its brand new iPhone 4S. If you ask Siri, why it’s so great, it answers with disarming humility: “I am what I am.”
It’s not just the usual speech recognition
Siri goes well beyond voice recognition by applying artificial intelligence combined with natural language processing to understand the meaning behind questioners’ sentences. When you ask Siri to tell how is the weather outside, it doesn’t deal with the request using only speech recognition, it sends the question to the cloud where a powerful artificial intelligence algorithm analyzes the words in the question to find out what exactly do you want. It then tells you the weather of the location where you are.
It’s not so easy to understand and interpret the question as per the requirement of the user. For example, “I like two sailboats around eBay” and “I like to sail boats around the bay.” will act same for an usual speech recognition software. So, Siri applies natural language processing to serve the requests of the user. It continues to grow its knowledge, a kind of machine learning in order to become better and better.
How can Siri help you?
You can ask Siri to set a reminder for you, send a text message, get weather reports, set calendar appointments, send e-mails, search through your contacts, set alarms and timers, or get directions. Reminders and tasks are location-aware through the new Reminders app in iOS 5, so you can ask Siri to remind you to pick up your dry cleaning when you leave work.
Future of speech recognition
Speech recognition has been emerging over past few years and intelligent voice assistant like Siri are proving themselves in the field of technology. Not only Siri, even Android phones have their own cloud based voice recognition but unlike Siri its limited to a set of commands to initiate communication. Even Samsung phones like Samsung Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note have a voice based assistant powered by Vlingo’s Virtual Assistant but it is also limited to set of commands. Over the next few years, software like Siri will be implemented in personal computers and other electronic appliances allowing you to communicate with the device without physically interacting with it. You can also try some great things using Windows Speech Recognition available in Windows Vista/7.
Things to note about Siri
- Siri supports English, German and French voice input. Apple said more languages would be added over time.
- For time being Siri is not available in all countries. It’s available in US and UK counter-parts.
- You need to buy iPhone 4S to use Siri which will cost you around Rs. 45000
Read more on: http://www.techntricks.com/the-emergence-of-speech-recognition/#ixzz23ymYaU00
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