Bill Gates Still Believes Speech Will Replace Keyboards

from the the-product-of-the-future... dept

Bill Gates has been an incredibly successful businessman, but that doesn't mean he's particularly good at predicting the future of technology. Remember his claim that spam would be gone within 2 years... which he made in 2004? However, if there's one prognostication that Gates just can't let go of, it's his belief that speech recognition will replace keyboards as the preferred input device for computers. He's been saying it for years and years and years, without much to show for it. I had thought (hoped?) that he'd realized maybe he was wrong on this one, but apparently not. In a recent speech, he's insisting that speech recognition (and touch screens) will start to surpass keyboards as the input method of choice for many people. I was going to go back and put together a list of the times he had predicted that in the past, but it appears that Matthew Paul Thomas already did that a few years ago. Note that his earliest predictions (starting in 1997) were that speech would surpass keyboards within a decade. This quote is from October 1997:

"In this 10-year time frame, I believe that we'll not only be using the keyboard and the mouse to interact, but during that time we will have perfected speech recognition and speech output well enough that those will become a standard part of the interface."

If you go to Matthew's site, you'll find a lot more like that, continuing on through the years, with some different prediction time frames. This isn't to say that speech recognition hasn't gotten a lot better, and isn't used in many more ways today than it was in the past -- but it's not come anywhere close to replacing a keyboard for a variety of good reasons that have much less to do with technology than with how people work. Imagine just how noisy your typical office would be if you had to speak to your computer rather than type? Typing isn't used just because it's efficient, but because it lets people work without disturbing others, and without letting everyone else know every little thing that you're doing. Yes, speech recognition technology is getting much better and it's useful in some situations, but it's certainly not the perfect interface for an awful lot of what people do on a computer.

104 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Google Embracing Unintentional Crowdsourcing

from the sneaky-bastards dept

I'm always fascinated by businesses that are built around incentives to multiple parties, where all those incentives align even if not everyone participating is aware of it. One of the best in the business at coming up with such things is Luis von Ahn, who has done research for many years on creating systems online that get other people to do some kind of "work" for you. After the CAPTCHA concept, probably von Ahn's most famous concept is the ESP Game, which is a game that helps to get much more detailed info about what's in any image by having multiple play a game to name what's in an image. People get more points if they match up keywords faster, encouraging them to be as accurate as possible in defining the key characteristics in an image.

Last year, von Ahn went and gave a talk at Google, after which he licensed the concept of the ESP Game to Google (though, Google's version was too boring to get very much attention). However, it appears that the folks at Google did pick up a few additional lessons in how this concept works. Paul Kedrosky points us to the news that Google is admitting its GOOG-411 project has little to do with taking on the 411 telephone information service, and everything to do with building a better speech recognition system. You see, to build speech recognition, you need many different voices saying many different phonemes (the sounds that make up words) in a variety of accents/tones/pitches/etc. Rather than go out and ask people to speak, Google gets plenty of phonemes just by providing this service.

Cynics may call this exploitation or sharecropping, but it's nothing of the sort. It's giving something of value to get something of value -- even if not everyone is fully aware of what the exchange really is about. Too many people seem to think the idea of "crowdsourcing" is really just about getting the crowd to do work for you -- but that's not it at all. It's about setting up incentives so that everyone involved gets value in some form or another, making it a beneficial transaction to everyone.

8 Comments | Leave a Comment..