The launch of Siri with iPhone 4S has completely captured the imagination of the iphone chatterati network. The amount of gushing that goes with the fact, that, you have a device which responds to your commands, brings the heydays of the Terminator movie series, where Arnold was at the beck and call of a young teenager , responding to his every command.
Typical to style, 20 years later, Bollywood seems to have reached the game. The recent movie, Players[with incredibly bad reviews], has the villian living in a self-designated villa , has access controlled via voice commands. But, technical reality is far more complex.
Siri, is expected to respond to certain set of commands and speak back at you with relevant information, or maybe some bullshit in exceptional circumstances. It is a step forward. It is tribute to the marketing genius of steve jobs, that, before he left this planet he made two huge contributions, which will change technology as we know it.
a) Tablets
b) Making Voice recognition fashionable and user friendly.
Obviously, the 2nd one was a case of buying the technology and finetuning it further.
But, for people who have worked on voice recognition as a commercially viable proposition, it is a surprise, how, something like this works.
technically, as we know it, software today does not have the following capabilities.
a) Understand grammar
b)Translate voice into text.
What essentially happens , in this case, called 'pattern matching'. So, If I listen to the word 'New York' I reference my memory and see, if 'New York' is stored somewhere and match it to a response, which is subject to the command 'New York' .
Obviously, in such case, with 1000's of accents , nay, 100's of 1000's of accents, around, saying that we have an universal speech recognition device is a substantial fallacy. But, then, who am I to nitpick? The other result, that could happen, every damn iphone user, learns to speak with the americanised accent and British english can go to hell.[I do think British english is also recognizable] .Oops, was that blasphemous?
But, the real success of this endeavour, is that, today, we have a lot of interest, in speech recognition. This reminds me, that android as a platform, is already supposed to support voice. Why the hell has everyone forgotten that? This is precisely the reason, why? Steve Jobs was a marketing genius. Hell, If steve jobs told you, "Boys, if you jump of Niagra Falls, you will get my free autobiography,personally signed", I'm willing to bet , there will be some , who will do that?
The power of the man, himself. That, here a disavowed, iphone guy, still respects him.
I do believe though, that, in the longer run, Google will win the battle, in android[unless ofcourse, something else comes up] . The very nature of the medium , which allows developers to build products you wanna see, and the free nature of the platform, will win.
Now, Microsoft guys will hate me for this. But, in my opinion , in the battle between Microsoft vs Linux , open source has already won, since,every big product uses, open source
Webserver - apache with php5
database - mysql
OS - a flavour of linux
So, it is a matter of time.
So, all android guys, who're around? The point is this.
Use google's infrastructure. They have a great database of phrases. Now, bring out your genius in terms of packaging. Just build another Siri. IRIS ,anyone
We have a leader , then, ladies and gentlemen.
[P.S. -: ignore the typos]
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