Siri: The Intelligent Assistant
I’ve been looking at voice recognition technology since the early 1990s. Both IBM and Microsoft spent years integrating it with their operating systems (OS/2 had one of the most advanced voice systems I had ever seen—at least up until the mid-90s). However, both companies failed to stir up much enthusiasm for the technology among consumers. The truth was this: old-school voice recognition (VR) required tons of training, and most users gave up long before they ever started to get any value out of it.
Things started to
change when Dragon Naturally Speaking came along in the late 90s. The product
required little training and was remarkably accurate. Nuance now owns them and
is generally known as a leader in VR. Still, voice recognition usually fails
when it comes to understanding context. Siri, which uses Nuance’s VR
technology, aptly breaks that barrier and, at least in the demos I saw,
actually appears to understand what the speaker is saying.
