Voice Command: Make Your Voice Heard

Written by: Khang Nguyen

Human Voice: Computer Activate!
Computer Voice: Access Granted!
Computer Voice: Welcome User …

            As time has passed our daily lives greatly depend on computers. By now, we mainly depend on online information. The Internet is great but all those URLs to type and all those mouse clicks to navigate through a site has become a hassle. Isn't there an easier way to do all this? Well there is one thing that we can turn to that almost every human on this planet has: speech. What if we can somehow manage to transfer our voice into digital text right in front of our computer monitors and household appliances? You would simply speak and the computer/machine would recognize your voice and obey your orders.

            I know that there is already voice recognition software out there that allow you to talk through a microphone and then the computer will turn your voice into text, i.e. IBM's ViaVoice and Dragon Naturally Speaking. This kind of voice recognition is still primitive when compared to its future form. The current software available only has one simple task, it allows you to use your voice and turns it into text. I mean this is great for people who don't like to type or can't type- you simply let the computer do it for you. However, these software have serious limitations. The computer may not fully be able to capture all of the words that you say onto your screen; often times it may make spelling errors like they're, when you mean there.

            In order to make voice recognition possible there must be a conversational interface. This interface will allow people to communicate with machines (the same way we communicate with one another), which will create, access, and manage information and solve problems. To put it in simple terms, there needs to be some kind of standard with this kind of technology, i.e. AI, languages, words, commands, etc. People don't want to see any mistakes. Spoken Language Systems (SLS) researchers have managed to make this sort of interface seem easy by implementing five main functions in real time, which is stated on the SLS web site:

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