Gadgetory

if you were a geeky kid you probably dreamed of a computer that would obey your voice commands Apple Siri brings that dream to life so why isn't it very good in 2011 Apple revealed the highest-profile voice assistant yet but anyone who's used Siri will know it often gets it wrong misunderstands or fails to perform as advertised what is it that makes series job so complicated and what does Siri needs to improve series first job is speech recognition also known as ASR it breaks down audio into bite-sized sounds which get checked against a vast database of spoken language the process is extremely sophisticated though because it processes data online the system pulls down if you've got no reception and as Patrick Naylor from London Imperial College explains it can be thrown off they're going to find it very hard to recognize anything which isn't already contained in the training data so if they come across unexpected accents or unexpected noise sources in the audio then it doesn't recognize them audio that doesn't match the database won't be recognized that's why Siri doesn't always handle accents well and can make major mistakes in noisy chaotic environments believe it or not speech recognition is the relatively easy bit the second half of what Siri has to do is a tough a problem not just figuring out what you say but what you mean so this is natural language understanding and LU where we're really trying to do something useful with the information that we've obtained Siri has to deduce the intent behind your words if you ask Siri for two tickets to a top grossing film at 9:00 p.m. within a mile of your house it has to identify from that jumble of words that what you want is to book movie tickets as humans way greater grasping the subtext beneath simple strings of words it's how we understand each other getting Siri to listen like a human is about much more than simple speech recognition so the natural language understanding parlor is a much harder problem and it's with that than most people I think feel dissatisfied at the current time from these services which are available Nou is a relatively new issue compared with speech recognition and the mainly ways to make Siri a bit more human in future for instance Siri could be more conversational if you ask for directions to a New York address Siri could ask you if you know the way to Brooklyn Bridge and offer to direct you from there talking back could make Siri more powerful if Siri was able to develop his dialogue capability beyond what it has at the moment which is that which is not non-existent but relatively primitive then that would make us feel I think much more able to get the information that we want in the way that we want it next theory relies on a microphone but what if it also used your phone's camera to monitor your lips and gather extra speech data this could filter out background noise or maybe even help Siri understand us when we've had one too many white wine spritzers say I need you know everything you could tell me about monkeys I seriously cannot wait for the robot uprising finally Siri performs better the more it knows if we want futuristic voice controlled assistance the price we pay may be our privacy Siri is more useful once it knows your address imagine what it could do with access to your medical records or an intimate knowledge of your finances we may reach a point where the only way to make systems like Siri more useful is to let them into our private lives whether we're comfortable with that is something we'll need to decide and soon so we've got to get a match between what are our expectations and what are our concerns particularly about privacy and how do we align those because we can't have it both ways do you think Siri will get better or not let me know and check back next time for another adventure in tech