Gadgetory

so when I was a kid having a conversation with your computer went a little something like this you would lie down on the couch and vent about all the problems in your life or whatever then you'd have to get up type your own response press Enter and listen back to the insights that it had to offer pathetic right fast-forward 25 years and voice-recognition a technology kind of like VR where someone is always claiming that they've made a big breakthrough and it turns out to still be kind of crap is finally gaining widespread adoption so early forms of voice recognition had very limited vocabularies some of the first systems from 1950s could only recognize about 10 words and even about 30 years later that number had grown to only around 20,000 which may seem like a lot but remember the English language has over 1 million words on top of that early software couldn't predict what words you were trying to say by using context so to these programs it was just as likely that you were trying to say bacon legs as bacon and eggs fortunately though we finally got computers in the late 1980s and early 1990s that had more storage and processing power allowing them to comprehend more natural speech instead of forcing you to talk like this so they could understand and nowadays technologies like Siri and Cortana don't rely on a limited dictionary or the relatively weak processor in your device at all instead they use huge cloud databases that store millions of words and phrases and have lightning-fast CPUs to understand what you mean with much more precision Google speech recognition software even learns from real search engine strings and can also recognize a variety of accents so you can use it whether you're from Eastern Canada or southern Texas but can the power of the cloud do more when you ask your phone for a sports score how does it know to tell you how your favorite team is doing instead of where to find a spork store well instead of listening to just one word at a time and I alluded to this before it listens to other words as well for context and uses probabilities to determine what you're trying to say this is a pretty involved process that uses complex mathematical models Google for example uses an artificial neural network that functions similarly to your own brain using digital neurons to learn what people are saying you can actually see this in action as Google now often changes what it thinks you said on the fly as you continue speaking and it gets better greater amounts of processing power have enabled everything from real-time translation to being able to talk to gain characters with a VR headset to emotion tracking in which a computer can use the timing and pitch of your voice to figure out how you're feeling we're even seeing it deployed in fighter aircraft so pilots can concentrate on mission objectives instead of fiddling with cockpit switches but although voice recognition has come a really long way its proliferation has presented us with some new challenges one big concern has been finding ways to filter out background noise so you'll still get correct results even if you're standing in the middle of a busy street and speaking of standing in public another massive issue is privacy many types of voice recognition software improve upon themselves by learning user habits and combined with cloud processing we've already seen some real concerns such as with Samsung Smart TVs earlier this year which had a privacy policy which some people believed allowed Samsung to monitor your living room conversations so while the tech has great potential we also need to make sure it will leave us all feeling like Winston Smith from 1984 and on the subject of 1984 you know what I don't miss about 1984 ugly websites that's right squarespace.com is where to go if you want to create a simple powerful beautiful website they've got 24/7 tech support via live chat and email to help you out it starts at only $8 a month and you get a free domain 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throw darts at pizzas and then eat pizza is covered in Marmite or hot sauce or whatever you it's it's good stuff check it out up there and I think that pretty much wraps it up right don't forget to leave a comment if you have suggestions for future fast as possible videos don't forget to subscribe and I will see you guys next time