The Amazon Echo device.
The Amazon Echo device.
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Ever since I saw the first Star Trek shows and they would say: “Computer, red alert!” and the red lights would flash and the siren would sound, I was hooked.
Talking has been a great idea for how to communicate with a computer, but always extremely difficult to achieve.
In particular, it takes a lot of computer power to convert a voice into text that a computer can process. In addition, figuring out what someone means can be equally difficult. Luckily, the rise in cloud computing has provided virtually unlimited computer horsepower to decipher what people are saying and what they mean.
The net result is that we now have a handful of speech interaction technologies available to us.
One of the first widely popularized technologies is Apple’s Siri, a feature on iPhones that receives commands and will execute them on your mobile phone.
Google came along with additions to its lineup with “OK Google” that lets people talk to their devices and through the Google Chrome Web browser.
Amazon surprised the world about a year ago with its Amazon Alexa products (Echo, Tap and Dot, $179.99, $129.99 and $49.99, respectively) that is a standalone product for the home that doesn’t require any computer or subscription to let you ask questions, play music and interact with it solely with your voice.
So far, Amazon Alexa is intended to be an open platform, intended for people to develop other “skills” that add functionality, such as controlling home automation, ordering a Uber, ordering items from Amazon and more.
About two weeks ago, Google released their voice enabled device, Google Home ($129 at madeby.google.com/home). Where Google Home shines is its deep search engine capabilities. It clearly was very good at looking things up.
I put some of the services to a few basic questions:
Google Home was able to tell me the driving distance from my home to the White House (283 miles by car). Amazon Alexa said it was 249 miles away “as the crow flies.” Cortana thought I wanted to drive TO my home, so told me I was only 4 minutes away. Google Home couldn’t tell me about local movies, but Amazon Alexa was quite happy to rattle off the local movies showing and their times. Cortana gave me a matrix of movie poster thumbnails that I could pick from to find more.
Listening to what people say and figuring out what they want is really hard to do. Add to that ambiguity, accents, popular culture and it’s amazing that computers can decipher what we’re saying at all.
Even so, we’re lucky to be living in a time where we can talk to a computer and have it react meaningfully. Next up, I want a transporter so I can teleport myself around the world in the blink of an eye. And, like these voice activated devices, I’d like the service to be free.
Mark Mathias is a 35+ year information technology executive, a resident of Westport, Connecticut. His columns can be read on the Internet at http://blog.mathias.org. He can be contacted at livingwith
