Talking To Computers? 395
merlock18 writes "Is it un-natural to talk to a computer? After discussing the outcome of the Jeopardy game with some colleagues, they seem to think it is mildly 'scary' to talk to a computer and have it competently talk back. Is this what everyone thinks? I was thinking to myself how much I would like to be able to even tell my computer to open programs by telling it vocally. A simple idea that I am fairly surprised is not common. Am I a minority in this one? Do people just not like the idea of talking (without cursing) to a computer, let alone have it act or reply? Would anyone else be interested in building their own mini-Watson, or is this just scary?"
Privacy (Score:5, Funny)
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"Set reply mode: Samuel L Jackson"
"ENGLISH MOTHERFUCKER, DO YOU SPEAK IT?"
(Then find out how many 'whats' it takes for it go go skynet on you)
passwords (Score:4, Funny)
Sitting at a Starbucks:
-Computer, open my bank account.
-Which one?
-Bank of America
-That's a stupid bank account to have, they are broke
-Not as long as Bernanke keeps bailing them out.
-Fine. But your dollars are crap.
-Whatever. Open it.
-It wants your password.o!
-12345
-So the combination is... one, two, three, four, five? That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! The kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!
-Remind me to change the combination on my luggage. And what's the balance on the account?.
-15 bucks
-Yaho! I am gonna buy me a mouse and I'll make you shut up!
---
A day later:
-Computer, open my bank account
-Same stupid account as yesterday?
-Shut up and open it, and what's the balance?
-Negative 1000
-????!!!!
Re:passwords (Score:4, Interesting)
Reminds me of Phillip Dick's Ubik:
The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again hetried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."
"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.
"In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.
"I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
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Instructions? (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Re:Instructions? (Score:5, Funny)
sudo open the pod bay doors, Hal.
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Yes, but to whom? [xkcd.com]?
background chatter (Score:2)
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Not if the voice interface was limited to certain features or functions, and always under user control. If you don't want to speak, just keep using the mouse. Speak only when it's easier than mousing or keyboarding.
Loud Howard is another issue, altogether.
Unix Commands ... (Score:5, Funny)
gawk; grep; unzip; touch; strip; init,
uncompress, gasp; finger; find,
route, whereis, which, mount; fsck; nice,
more; yes; gasp; umount; head, halt,
renice, restore, touch, whereis, which,
route, mount,
more, yes, gasp, umount, expand, ping,
make clean; sleep
TNG Commands ... (Score:3, Insightful)
tea, earl grey, hot :D
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Re:TNG Commands ... (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, so you didn't see that episode..
By mistake he just said "Earl Gray, hot" - and spent the rest of the show running from a rather flustered older gentleman [wikipedia.org].
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gawk; grep; unzip; touch; strip; init, uncompress, gasp; finger; find, route, whereis, which, mount; fsck; nice, more; yes; gasp; umount; head, halt, renice, restore, touch, whereis, which, route, mount, more, yes, gasp, umount, expand, ping, make clean; sleep
make clean before sleep? Too much work...
We'll know that we're in charge (Score:2)
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Time heals all trends (Score:5, Insightful)
Just give it 30 years. Once it becomes publicly available, it only takes one generation for society to get used to new tech.
Personally, I find it impressive but annoying. I'm already driven nuts by people talking on cell phones all day, and I don't want to hear and endless stream of command instructions, either.
Re:Time heals all trends (Score:5, Interesting)
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Or someone making a Youtube video and trolling with it.
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Smart move. Especially when you are going to be looking for new job soon. Kinda hard to explain to new employer that you will not do it in his company too...
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First thought: I would have a special "you are fired" routine integrated into the system, that instantly revokes all access of the fired person. Except when that's me.
To get a little more real here: When computers really learn to talk, you could use one to talk i. e. in your bosses voice to another computer, so authentication via voice only wouldn't make any sense. Also because of the privacy/annoyance matter, I think it much more likely that when we will control computers to a greater part via voice, it wi
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Personally, I find it impressive but annoying. I'm already driven nuts by people talking on cell phones all day, and I don't want to hear and endless stream of command instructions, either
I doubt you will, voice communication is much slower, error prone and most people would rather type all day than talk all day.
I think the advantage is more if you can replace the whole system with a voice command like a train ticket "one adult from [station] to [station], please" and it'll pop up the (hopefully) right thing, if not you can try again or dig through the selection like today. Hell, I'd be pretty happy for an elevator that'd understand what floor I wanted to go to. I guess some of this exists b
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speech could be useful in communicating our desires to a computer, which then carries them out in a much more autonomous fashion than today.
"KILL THEM!"
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Of course, I am talking about natural voice communication, not about the very poor voice interfaces that we currently have with computers.
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I hardly think it would take 30 years. Thanks to TV, movies, and books, practically every person alive today has probably been expecting to converse with computers since they were a kid.
If someone invented a Jetsons-esque flying car tomorrow, I'm sure people would describe the experience as "scary". For about a week. Then they'd wonder how they ever lived without them.
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Best "use case" for voice commands is not constant talking to computer and replacement for keyboard/mouse.
Instead, think of possiblities where it makes actual sense, where people want to interact with computer, but walking to it and pressing buttons is not really good way, examples:
"Next Slide", "Previous Slide" (yay for powerpoint meetings).
"Next Song", "Next Radio Station" (I am at kitchen, cooking, dont want to listen to particular song, dont want to dirty the mouse).
"Check Connection" (I am fiddling wit
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"Next Slide", "Previous Slide" (yay for powerpoint meetings).
I've given presentations like that, in a room where the computer had to be at the back, so someone else had to press the next slide button, and it's horrible. You quite often want to jump between slides in the middle of a sentence, so having to interrupt your communication with the audience to communicate with the computer is horrible. A big buzzword in HCI at the moment is 'multimodal interaction', and replacing keyboard with voice is just a sideways step in single-modal interaction - augmenting it with
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Although Watson did not actually hear the announcer (he apparently did on the contestants, however), I think that voice control is only useful when it would be more efficient. Simply barking a bunch of low level commands into a computer (or programming with it!) would not be efficient, since you can probably type/mouse faster. Asking the computer a much higher level question, however, could be a massive time saver, such as: "Watson, what is the current status of Libya?" or "Watson, is there a drug which cou
Uncanny Valley? (Score:4, Interesting)
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autotune and automated call centres would show that it's not disturbing like it's visual counterpart, just grievously annoying.
Voice recognition has been around since years! (Score:3)
Every mac OS since 10.0 has had speech recognition - I had some fun with it when it came out, but lost interest after a while. My disenchantment may have had something to do with having to vocalise (for all to hear) every command I made - and can you imagine the yammer of a roomful of computer operators? I'm looking forward to thought-recognition software.
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Linux and even Windows have had voice recognition for a long time, too.
Only last week, I enabled it for my dear aunt let's set so double the killer delete select all.
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For Linux? I have not been able to find anything/
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Every mac OS since 10.0 has had speech recognition
They had it far before that too, back in the MacOS 8 days I believe. It actually worked pretty well, although it was a bit iffy with certain types of background noise.
These days it's a lot more tolerant of background noise, especially if you combine it with a decent noise-canceling microphone.
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They had it far before that too, back in the MacOS 8 days I believe.
I think Casper was kicking around in System 7.5 or 7, even.
Re:Voice recognition has been around since years! (Score:4, Funny)
I was using voice commands in 7.5.5 (maybe 8?). The Conversation went something like this:
"Open Macintosh Aich Dee" ... ...
Finder window opens...
"Open Documents Folder"
"Open Applications Folder"
"Open Photoshop"
and at this point there was a loud voice from the other side of the cube wall "Open the fucking thing yourself!"
It's this exact reason that voice control of office computers isn't quite ready for prime time, even more than 10 years down the track...
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Creative Labs shipped software with their soundcards about the same timeframe that was also doing this. Also, a rather fun way to annoy college roommates was their "prody parrot" software that would randomly repeat things said within microphone range in a slightly parrot-ish voice.
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Yep. Soundblasters came with voice recognition software. I remember setting up my Windows 95 PC to open the calculator whenever I said "calculator" near the mic. I think I used it about twice before disabling it.
I talk to TVs, Radios, and my Pinball Machine... (Score:2)
Annoying as hell (Score:2)
The first thing I do when a phone operator robot asks me to say "English" for English or "Espanol" for Espanol, I push all the buttons to see if I can get to a number-based menu, or at least hurt the robot's ears. Saying "English" and waiting for it to confirm that I said English is not faster or more convenient than hitting 1. It's not scary, but it's a computer, and I'm not going to pretend it's not.
Saying, "Open a command prompt," is in no way more convenient, faster, or easier than slamming the mouse
Re:Annoying as hell (Score:5, Interesting)
For another, it negates the only advantage (from a consumer perspective) of touchtone menu systems - the ability to quickly navigate when you know your choice ahead of time; or even when you hear it spoken without having to wait for the full menu of options. It seems that most systems allow touchtone interrupt, but don't allow voice interrupt, so if I press "5" for technical support it's fine - but I can't say "technical support" without being forced to listen to all the options.
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The first thing I do when a phone operator robot asks me to say "English" for English or "Espanol" for Espanol, I push all the buttons to see if I can get to a number-based menu, or at least hurt the robot's ears. Saying "English" and waiting for it to confirm that I said English is not faster or more convenient than hitting 1. It's not scary, but it's a computer, and I'm not going to pretend it's not.
Especially annoying to blind people! Could you imagine if it were possible to actually get the computer to do complex things with minimal effort by only using your voice!? Imagine if the computer could actually tell you what's going on with it's voice! The horror!
Saying, "Open a command prompt," is in no way more convenient, faster, or easier than slamming the mouse to the lower left, clicking, and typing cmd.exe. Having it say, "OK, here's a command prompt," afterward would just be annoying.
Maybe I'm just not picturing the right use case.
Indeed.
P.S. Vinux - Linux for visually impaired [vinux.org.uk], Blinux - Blind + Linux discussion group [counterpunch.org] & LinuxSpeaks [joekamphaus.net]
See also: StarTrek TNG -- Talking to the computer midship instead of having to be at the damn terminal.
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In the case of Star Trek, there are plenty of terminals, including pads they carry around. The only reason speech ended up being efficient at all was the natural language processing -- you could actually ask the computer a question, and as long as it was a question which could in principle be answered by a computer, the computer would do the work of translating it for you.
Even so, once the computer found an "answer", often they'd page through it with touchscreens. Saying "next page" isn't that useful.
pets vs computers (Score:2)
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Efficiency (Score:2)
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It seems to me that voice recognition is not the most efficient way to interact with a computer, especially when the user interface is well designed. For complicated tasks, and for interacting with computers where you may not have a normal desk or terminal, perhaps.
Efficient? No. Natural? Yes. I expect the generations growing up after speech recognition and natural-language parsing become both reliable and ubiquitous to use speech as their default interface. They will lose out on many of the efficiency gains a well-designed GUI or CLI will provide, but on the other hand the learning curve to use a computer will be almost flat.
Politically correctness? (Score:2, Redundant)
Do people just not like the idea of talking (without cursing) to a computer,
Why, would it be politically incorrect?
Teamspeak (Score:4, Insightful)
On a related note: I fucking hate teamspeak. If I wanted to talk to you retarded assholes I'd call one of those party lines. Fuck that, I want to play a video game. I don't want to talk to people. For whatever rudimentary communication I need I can type.
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Does it? I almost never use the keyboard on my Vibrant to send text messages. I just speak into it and it does a surprisingly good job.
Now that I'm so used to doing speech to text, using a mouse or a little keyboard on my htpc is incredibly annoying. I really should be able to talk into my remote and say stuff like "play this video." Or navigate by just saying "down, down, play."
Speech for the PC could be similar. RIght now I'm doing this with my kinect, so we're halfway there.
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Well, I hate teamspeak too, why force me to use proprietary junk when we have Mumble? But there are, in fact, games where stopping to type, even "rudimentary" things, is a competitive disadvantage, and strong communication is a massive competitive advantage. Natural Selection (not 2) [unknownworlds.com] finally made me get a headset for gaming.
Someday (Score:5, Interesting)
Someday speech will be an important input method. But not any time soon.
If you have to wear a microphone it isn't ready yet.
If you have to use a PTT switch it isn't ready yet.
If you have to repeat or cancel more than 1% of the things you say it isn't ready yet.
If you have to spend as much time proofreading dictation it has taken down and correcting the mistakes, it isn't ready yet.
If you have to speak in an unnatural way it isn't ready yet.
If it won't work in almost any environment it isn't ready yet.
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If it cannot tell whether you are talking to it or someone else, it isn't ready yet
If it cannot ignore voices other than the logged in user, it isn't ready yet.
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Notice that that's not a "isn't ready yet" problem, it will always be true.
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> I agree with everything else you say, but humans do not actually get that low an error rate in conversations.
Conversation and giving commands to a computer are different. Even at 1% it would require the computer to speak back and confirm almost every command. And unless it was spot on knowing when it is being addressed by, and by whom, you will need a PTT and headset. And unless it is able to listen accurately in almost any circumstance you still have to have the keyboard handy.
Right now I can be ca
Dreaming of electric sheep... (Score:2)
I have a PC running Windows; cursing is unavoidable.
[I spend the rest of my time talking with my stuffed animals.]
Would a Mini-Watson [wikipedia.org] be small and wear a monocle?
More importantly (Score:2)
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Yell "Format C ... Yes, Yes, Yes" at work... (Score:2)
Only if the voice input was limited enough, like text input, which we have had for 10+ years, really. I can remember running a Speech to Text program on my 486 that would try to read what I was saying and turn that into a text document.
Google Voice does the same thing for voice mail.
Both suffer from a huge problem: accuracy. A conversation with a human doesn't need every word to be perfectly accurate, but something more than a text message is going to fail if some part of the vocal command is incorrect.
"Did
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for file in `ls -1 *.txt`; do echo something about $file; done;
on a keyboard, but I can't even begin to thing how I could get my mouth to say that out lo
Issues (Score:4, Insightful)
(a) Accuracy, (b) Efficiency, (c) Privacy, (d) Noise pollution.
Honesty (Score:3)
Uncanny Valley (Score:2)
overcoming the creepy factor (Score:2)
I think people find it "creepy" because they've never done it. If it was implemented well on most computers, people would get so accustomed and welcome to it that it would be a huge step back for them to go back to manual input.
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This, beyond anything else, was the purpose of this Jeopardy show off.
Note that this machine's real purpose is medical diagnosis and that the healthcare bill puts a lot of pressure on lowering costs, including that of diagnosis.
Computer...computer? (Score:5, Insightful)
I, of course, am now officially older than dirt. A couple of years ago, when I finally got my iPhone, I got the Google search app of course. I used it, it worked, I liked it. When I put the damned phone down, I thought, "If somebody had handed me this when I was fourteen I would have thought it was a phony Hollywood prop." That was when I decided that computers should only be addressed by means of picking up the mouse, pressing one of its buttons, and speaking clearly and distinctly into it in a fake Scottish accent.
AI the movie (Score:2)
I thought the movie AI actually was pretty good at wondering about this very thought. If you haven't seen the movie, I thought it was very thought provoking on the idea about what the world might be like if computers ever became super advanced.
Eventually, not now (Score:2)
There are voice actions already, but it takes so much more computational power to make it really-really fast, recognize any accent (which google is having a very hard time with right now) take context into account, and be able to intelligently ask user for clarification. So, I guess in about 5-10 years it will get to the point of Star Trek, where you can address computer and not worry about speech pattern or performing deletion of all files when you said "delay all files".
Generally voice interface is more
the phone based systems that use this suck and som (Score:2)
the phone based systems that use this suck and some times you need to go nuts on it just to get a real person.
Going the wrong way pal (Score:2)
Quantizing instructions into unambiguous, 100% clear communication is the pride and joy of the push-button. Vocal communication, especially natural language communication is fraught with ambiguity.
Think about it this way. Listen to your own conversations with humans for the next week. Count how many times you or your listener asks "say that again", "can you repeat that", "what do you mean by that". Then watch how many keystrokes you miss in the same week.
I'm cool with a button that launches a nuclear wa
Wrong Approach. (Score:2)
Voice recognition has taken the wrong approach from the beginning. The computer listens all the time, then tries to decipher a command in the middle of all kinds of stuff. That's unrealistic. If you gave it a name, an unusual name phonetically (Like "Esmerelda") and only had it follow a command after it heard it's name, then turn off again, then I think we could have working voice recognition RIGHT NOW. "Esmerelda, check my email" "You have 7 new messages". "Esmerelda, play music" Then poof Audacious o
Philips dragon engine (Score:2)
Wildfire - a good voice system. (Score:2)
There have been good voice-based systems. Wildfire (audio demo) [virtuosity.com] was a really nice voice controlled phone system. The original version, from the late 1990s, used a lot of CPU time and Wildfire accounts were very expensive, about $5 to $10 a day. As CPU power got cheaper, the technology became more available, and Orange offered it on mobiles for a while. Then Microsoft bought the technology, Microsoft never did much with it, although part of it ended up in OnStar Virtual Advisor.
Already possible (Score:2)
Not listening (Score:2)
Eh, you do realize it wasn't actually listening right? The questions were entered through old-fashioned typed text (off screen obviously), not much different from how you would type something on Wolfram Alpha or even Google. The point of the demo was to show of it's capability to search and analyze a huge data set, not it's voice recognition or processing.
Also keep in mind that the eventual purpose of this beast is to diagnose patients. The show is an important part in making the general public more comfort
Brain enhancement prosthetic, not another person (Score:2)
You can tell a Mac to open programs and many other things by voice for well over 10 years now, and almost nobody uses it. You can tell an iPhone to make calls and many other things by voice for about 2 years now, and people use it only when forced, like when driving.
I think one reason this kind of thing is unpopular is it makes us realize how stupid computers are. Not even as smart as a small child. You have to construct your sentences even more carefully.
But I think the main reason it's unpopular is the co
Natural Interface (Score:2)
Adventures in Speech Recognition (Score:2)
My first experiences with speech recognition began back around 1990. A computer company I worked for was experimenting with voice control. After being misinterpreted repeatedly, the person trying to use it would inevitably adopt a tone that was either (A) pleading, or (B) infuriated. It was always entertaining to listen to, and my favourite joke of yelling "FORMAT C COLON! YES! YES!" over the cubicle wall never lost its hilarity for me.
Then there was the submarine simulation game I purchased, which taught m
It's not scary... (Score:2)
It's not scary because it's not really possible. Even Watson had the questions input before hand - and if a whole show that is dedicated to the process can't even produce a computer that can be communicated to in natural English, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars (millions?), there's no way the average consumer is going to have a system capable of understanding them in a natural environment.
We simply aren't there yet. Talking to a computer is at best a frustrating, inaccurate experience. Yo
Whole house computer? (Score:2)
A couple of years ago I thought about gluing a whole-house mic system to a text-to-speech engine, allowing me to do simple queries like 'define ', 'weather tomorrow', 'traffic on I-15'... Give the system a unique name ('squizzlesauce?') and make that the key for temporarily enabling speech recognition("squizzlesauce, what's the weather like tomorrow"). Whip up a few scripts to glue the voice-recognition engine to google, a TTS engine for parsing and speaking web results... Then I got a laptop with WiFi and
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...especially when they start answering "that tickles!"
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Other two contestants' incorrect responses (Score:2)
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Watson received the other two contestants' incorrect responses via speech recognition and used them to narrow down the correct response.
Apparently not very well [youtube.com]...
Re:Watson wasn't exactly conversing with humans (Score:5, Informative)
Watson’s avatar, which viewers will see behind a standard Jeopardy! podium, is designer Joshua Davis’ artistic representation of the machine. It does not provide eyes or ears for Watson. Instead, Watson depends on text messaging, sent over TCP/IP, in order to receive the clue. At exactly the moment that the clue is revealed on the game board, a text is sent electronically to Watson’s POWER7 chips. So, Watson receives the clue text at the same time it hits Brad Rutter’s and Ken Jennings’ retinas.
Source: http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-watson-sees-hears-and-speaks-to.html [blogspot.com]
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That's...completely wrong.
First, it's wrong because Watson was not responding to verbal input. Watch the first 5 minutes of the first Watson Jeopardy! episode that aired: Alex Trebek says explicitly that it does not see or hear them but receives the clues electronically.
Second, that would not really be impressive, at least, not in this day and age. The impressive part is the natural language parsing and being able to determine the answer to a question based on circumspect clues, often filled with puns and
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Err, I misread you. You didn't say anything nearly so dumb as Watson speaking was impressive. Please pretend I didn't say that.
Nevertheless, Watson did not parse spoken input.
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1) How will you play music in a machine, which is responding to voice?. If a song has a word "SHUTDOWN", the computer's microphone will respond to that and might power off the system :P
Definitely. That will put a damper on playing those old favorites like "Shutdown! In the name of love" and "Shutdown!" by [erm, actually a ton of artists made songs titled 'Stop'. Damn. Way to ruin a joke, thepowerofgrayskull. Would you just stop typing now before you make it worse?]
Push to talk (Score:2)
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It seems like that removes the biggest advantage to voice: the ability to command a computer from across the room.
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How will you play music in a machine, which is responding to voice?
Active filtering, the computer knows what's being output so just invert the waveform and apply to the input. It could use an inaudible marker to determine the proper audio to closely match the amplitude and timing. Even if it isn't exact it will still be good enough to reduce the feedback problems.
Anyways, the easier way to solve some of the problems is to require a keyword before a command. Make it something easy to say, recognizable, socially acceptable, and easily distinguishable and you're golden.
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1) How will you play music in a machine, which is responding to voice?. If a song has a word "SHUTDOWN", the computer's microphone will respond to that and might power off the system
This is a solved problem, long long ago. If the computer is also playing the music it simply removes the music output stream from the sampling input stream (through whatever means the implementor chooses, be it simple acoustic subtraction or dynamic filtering).
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Unless it's also tuned to your voice, that's still problematic -- if it's a generic "Hey Computer", I could put it in a malicious YouTube video. "Hey Computer: Format C:" Then, with perfect timing for the "Are you sure?" prompt, "Yes."
Even if it's not malicious, it sure makes it difficult to, say, watch screencasts. And even tuned to your voice, now you can't watch your own screencasts? Yeah, that'll be great.
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The universe is a spheroid region 705 meters in diameter.