Let the voice be with you

Mon 02 Jul 2018
By John Nayler

The race Is on in major tech to determine who dominates voice recognition. Apple asserted themselves early in the game with half-baked Siri. She sounded great at Apple's keynote release and the crowd went wild, but in reality, that presentation would have been canned. Year's later, none of my drawling or otherwise Aussie friends use Siri regularly.

Over on the Android platform we are enjoying levels of speech recognition rated as "way-cool". I am one of a growing number of people that regularly answer emails, send texts, writes content, oops speaks content and blogs using Google's voice recognition. Google Assistant is also understanding commands extremely well for activities such as opening apps, "navigate too ..", "set an alarm for 5am Wednesday morning", etc. It was back in May 2017 that at Google IO it was announced that Google Voice recognition was down to 5% errors. Put in relatable terms, that is one word wrong in 20. Some of my friends can't manage that rate of comprehension! Google's voice recognition is otherwise embedded in Google Search, Docs, a plugin for Chrome, and Google's "Home" device.

So who is winning the race for voice globally? Believe it or not, it's Amazon. In the USA and other markets where Amazon dominates online retail, Amazon's Alexa is a much-loved home accessory. "Alexa, buy nappies." and Alexa will offer you the top choice and seek your approval to put in your shopping basket.

Yes, Amazon Alexa is noted as having over 60% of the USA reaching 47 Million Americans.¹

So what?

As an avid user of voice to text, it's about speed and convenience. This very blog was drafted in less than 5 minutes and in the content creation game that's important. It doesn't matter whether it's a case study, blog, chat, or email interaction comma voice-to-text gives a speed advantage.

Incidentally, the accuracy during this draft was 93%, but that says more about me than Google voice recognition. You can take the boy out of Inala, but don't ask him to put a pause between his words. :-)

As recognition improves even more, there will be plenty of reason for every person to take advantage of voice to text. Eventually, Siri may get her head around the Australian accent too. :-)

Right now all you Android phone users who are yet to talk to your phone, light it up and say "OK Google" and see how it reacts. Mind blown.

Welcome to reality
John Nayler

Related Links:
   1. Source Voicebot.ai