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Talking To Computers?
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?"
I can't speak for anybody else, but a lot of the time I don't *want* people to overhear what I'm asking my computer to do...
Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
Whatever you say Hal. On a Clive Cussler note, Hiram Jaeger.... eat your heart out!
Not only privacy but the standard office would sound like a bar of a busy Friday night. Can you imagine loud howard dictating a document just over the cubicle wall?
when swearing at them improves their performance.
All your database are belong to U.S.
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.
LCARS. Yes, talking to a computer would be weird, but could also be awesome!
I wonder if there has been any research on the uncanny valley for speech...
I have no problems talking to computers, I do it all the time when trying to fix 'em. The day they can understand what I'm saying *and reply in kind* is the day I find a new profession. Veterinarian perhaps...
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.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
There is no new revelation about talking to machines, it has been going on since man looked outside of the sacred relationship for some semblance of reasoning about his existence and meaning in life. The Jeopardy 'thing' with IBM was just another step in the direction you can't deny, resistance is futile.
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 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.
People talk to their pets all the time, and although most pets have just as much of a chance of understanding what's being said as most computers, that doesn't strike people as odd.
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. As far as voice-to-text, if the recognition is accurate, it can possibly increase productivity depending on the person and their typing skills. On another not, however, this is a way for paralyzed individuals to interact with computers without the use of traditional means. However, using voice interaction in tandem with other means could be a more efficient route. Having a computer run commands in the background via voice commands while you interact with it in more traditional ways in the foreground.
Do people just not like the idea of talking (without cursing) to a computer,
Why, would it be politically incorrect?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Speech recognition sucks and always will. I can hotkey my way to any program faster than I can say the name of it. Simply double clicking and icon is super easy. Why do I want to have to say "Computer! Open! Porn!!!" when I have a shortcut to all my porn on my desktop? it doesn't even make sense. And entering urls? It would take 10min just to get the url at the top of this article in.
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.
It's only a matter of time before some corporation mines data from a nation full of ever-listening computers.
Oh no... Someone is WRONG on the internet! Watson received the answers via text file, he did not hear Trebek or visually see the answers.
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.
Democrat delenda est
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
The people at Nuance (used to be ScanSoft/SpeechWorks/etc.) have been doing it for years. I'm sure most people on Slashdot have heard of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The newest version understands more commands than you probably care to use --stuff like "Open Firefox" ... "Send an email to Mike" ... you can browse the web by voice and control the mouse. Some people swear by it, but speech still doesn't seem like a natural computer interface. At least not yet. Nevertheless, the software is out there.
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.
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 be small and wear a monocle?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If it can talk, and you smack it, what happens?
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?]
Give the machine a phrase it has to listen to first before responding to anything else, like how Apple Macs do.
Example: "Hey Computer: Launch Firefox" as opposed to "Launch Firefox."
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
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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 you mean 'Delete *.txt' or 'Delete startdottxt' or 'Delete start.txt'?"
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
(a) Accuracy, (b) Efficiency, (c) Privacy, (d) Noise pollution.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
It's creepy if the computer is trying to pass itself off as a person, because fakeness in social interactions is creepy whether it's a Wallmart greeter or a computer program being fake. If the computer is plainly just presenting itself as a voice interface it won't feel creepy for very long if at all.
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 wordplay. Especially the "SPOKEN" part, which you put in all-caps as though it were a particular achievement: they had a handful of stock phrases and a text-to-speech synthesizer the likes of which you could run on your home computer for many years now. About the only thing Watson did that was less impressive than that was the mechanism to press the buzzer (even the stupid globe-orbits animation was kinda cool and at least highly customized).
Much like the animation of human features, there's an uncanny valley in communication that can provoke a strong xenophobic response. If someone or something can respond to *some* conversation but not all conversation, it tickles something deep in my brain that produces an instinctive reflex of distrust and hostility. Watching Watson, I found that the way the interaction was framed as if it was natural conversation put me into this uncomfortable zone where I found myself thinking "KILL IT WITH FIRE" more than once.
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.
Watson received the other two contestants' incorrect responses via speech recognition and used them to narrow down the correct response.
CB radios have long solved this: push to talk. Squeeze the mic when you want to give a voice command.
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.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
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.
No sig today...
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.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
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.
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 efficient when we can't type/select something or when a short-hand is too difficult to program.
Examples -- car systems and hands-free phones ("Call John Smith at work"/"Navigate to 12th street" - until autopilot works flawlessly typing that stuff is difficult), directories, where saying a name would be faster than flipping though a large list without knowing how exactly it's spelled.
If you can type, it's faster to press control-o and click enter than say "Computer: open last used file" and get a confirmation. But if you don't know shortcuts and having difficulty with movement, speech recognition is already your only option.
For typing I'd rather prefer a neural short-hand: you don't bother family (or are forced to lock yourself in a soundproof room to dictate a large amount of text) and you eliminate the slowest part of your "think -> type -> text" route.
Hyperom.com
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.
Sapere aude!
the phone based systems that use this suck and some times you need to go nuts on it just to get a real person.
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 warhead. I'm really cool with a button behind a cover. And I'm super cool with a button behind glass and a hammer to break the glass. I'm frightenned if the button is voice-activated -- even if the cover and glass and hammer are voice activated too.
But think about the benefits of going the other way. If you could push a button to tell someone to do something. Wow. They'd call it text messaging.
Incidentally, welcome to written instructions -- which went typed for improved clarity and legibility. There's a reason that contracts are composed in text, and not in speech. Could you imagine a voice recording of a contract?
But there are plenty of voice-activated solutions to computer interaction. Dragon Naturally Speaking is one of the most reknowned. I used it in 1996, and it's become way better since. Use it for a week, and you'll discover that your own voice ins't anywhere near as efficient as ten fingers. And you'll find that you don't speak clearly at all -- and that your friends and family just guess what you're talking about, because it never really mattered before.
Think of all of the food you've ordered at restaurants, and the number of times the server mis-heard you, and brought the wrong something. Now remember that using a computer is about giving thousands of discrete commands in a given hour. Take the same percentage, and tell me how many times your computer is going to mis-hear you. That's how annoying it'll be.
Oh yeah. Background music makes that even worse.
Think about driving with voice commands -- turn how much left how quickly?
But you can easily simulate this. Get a friend. Have them use the computer, and you tell them what you want -- in commands that would be unambiguous if they heard you correctly. Try it for a full work day. See if they open the correct applications, hit the roght commands, and do the right stuff. You'll find that vocal communication is about conveying abstract thought and complex concepts, not directions nor instructions.
Which is why technical writing like operation manuals and really good recipe books are a very different kind of reading. And then you'll see the ikea picture/glyph instructions, which make even less sense.
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 opens up and plays some mp3s.
Can somebody build this app and put it in the Linux Mint repos please? Thanks in advance.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
A computer that can read your mind is a computer that can tell others (human and computer) what you are thinking. NO THANK YOU.
Back in the days (must be at least 10 years ago by now) I used the dragon engine from philips to control my pc. To be honest, it had a cool factor but got old soon. Not only was it quite inaccurate at the time, but I found it to be slow in comparison with just mouseclicks. Besides, at night when the family sleeps I don't want to be making to much sounds.
is it possible to talk with an computer. I could not recognized
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).
tea, earl grey, hot :D
There have been good voice-based systems. Wildfire (audio demo) 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.
Then do so; Windows Vista/7 has out-of-the-box speed recognition with the ability to launch programs once it is sufficiently trained to your voice.
OS/2 is dead. I thought everyone knew that.
Opera already provides a speech interface. Mobile phones routinely provide voice dialling and similar functionality. This technology is already here. Neither is it reliable enough nor is it more efficient than just using a mouse/keyboard. I expect that the main driver behind this is accessibility rather than UX. As for the computer talking back, it's a lot easier to get the computer to say something rather than get it to process human speech input.
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 comfortable with machines instead of doctors telling them what's wrong and what to do about it.
We would yell open minesweeper from the other room. I think my friend had it enabled for one evening only.
I am not a script!
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to talk a computer. First off it would know everything, and if it doesn't know the answer it there's the internet at it's ports to find the information. so what would be the point in communicating with one other than to have it do something you can't? I wouldn't find it weird that a computer could one day be teaching my kids in school but to realistically believe that you could have a conversation with one and it would respond in a non robotic response is laughable, in this day in age and I'm sure most people would be afraid of it. Hollywood doesn't paint a pretty picture for computers that can talk back And for most of the people I talk to on the phones who seem to have never grasped that computer are going to be around and you need to know how to use one or your going to get left behind I'm sure would be afraid of anything they can't comprehend and would love to just blow them up and go back to the stone age.
This is a Mac, what you have there is an embarrassment to your fellow computer users.
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 computer is a brain enhancement prosthetic for our own brain, not another person's brain. It is a part of us. We don't want to hear the other half of our brain or our brain enhancement prosthetic talk to us.
However, I think we are willing to anthropomorphize some programs. For example, people do that with Google. That is a separate brain you call out to and ask a question.
On the contrary, I think it's the most natural way to interact with a computer. Back when science fiction authors first started trying to imagine what computers of the future would be like, they almost always imagined speech to be the interface. It was only experience, with the primitive 20th-century interfaces that we had, that habituated people to thinking that keyboards and mice were the way to interact with a computer. The command line and GUI are un-natural ways to communicate, which we've gotten used to; speech is a natural way to communicate, which (in the context of human-machine communication) we've gotten un-used to.
(Note: I actually find CLI and GUI to offer many advantages over speech interfaces and don't expect them to ever go away now that we have them...however, if speech processing had been practical as the next step after punch cards, I don't believe CLI or GUI would ever have been developed, at least not as primary interfaces with the amount of depth they have today)
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I'm sure people were scared to get into a horseless carriage at one point, since there was no horse. Frickin' horseless carriages how do they work?
Anyways now people are scared to get on horses. I assume the day will come when people are not only scared of using command line interfaces but also using a computer that only has kb and mouse inputs instead of audio or some other "new" input method.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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 me that, contrary to my expectations, short utterances were more frequently misinterpreted than longer phrases. I recall giving the succinct command to "DIVE", to which the game responded "We don't have a periscope sir".
I was impressed when dictation products like "Naturally Speaking" came along, but ultimately decided that even 98% accuracy wasn't good enough. Correcting two percent of things that are recognized incorrectly is tiresome, and negates any time saving you would have gained.
Today I use voice dialing on a number of so-called "smart phones", and the frustration is about the same as it was 20 years ago. I need to deliberately mispronounce my own surname when trying to call family members, and mimicking the phone's own mispronunciation of my name doesn't help.
I think were still a long ways away from having any meaningful (non-aggravating) chats with our computers
.
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. You get better concept recognition out of a 2 year old than you do out of a computer as a general rule. Specific situations and specific topics are/can be well understood by computers, but beyond that, computers aren't even close. Heck, I don't even know of a computer that can parse written natural English with anything approaching a 7 or 8 year old's ability to understand what's being discussed. With the vagueries of speech added in, a computer has no chance currently.
So is it scary? No, merely frustrating or curious/interesting at best. Useful or functional? Only in limited situations. I will be happy to talk to my computer when it can understand what I say with the same confidence level as an average adult, but until then, it's easier/faster/more efficient to communicate with the computer in a method IT can understand.
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 lost the need.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
I've wanted something like this for a long time. I want to be able to post questions to my computer, such as "when was such-and-such a film made?", or "when was such-and-such a person born?". Questions that you could fairly easily look up yourself, but if you're, say, in teh kitchen, and the computer is in the other room, you want to be able to throw the question out there and get a response. I tried to write something like this myself, but unless you specify a grammar (which is difficult if you want to include freeform words like people's names and the names of movies and books etc), then the speech recognition is simply terrible. I tried two libraries (or was it three?) and they all had similarly horrible results. With a pre-defined grammar they did great. Without one, the results were atrocious.
tl;dr: I want it, but I can't seem to get it to work.
Move sig!
I dictated some technical documentation using Vista Voice Recognition. It works OK if you are trying to tell a story like "The Three Little Pigs" but when you try to do something technical it will loose its mind. It was almost impossible to dictate in Word. I would be speaking and say a word that had a possible command meaning and off to the races we would go.
For example I would say something "be careful of the formatting here.." and the formatting function in Word would come up. If you ever need to use this function, try using Notepad rather than Word. Also when running, it seemed to spend so much time trying to figure out what command you wanted that it was slow in Word. God help you if you were writing a book to describe how to use Word.
They need a feature to turn the command interpretation off. Not sure if this is an issue on the Mac as I had not yet tried it on that machine.
Back when I was demoing Windows 7 on one of my machines, I tried to get it's built-in voice recognition working, which I DID, but it was butchered beyond usability. Ironically, the simpler low-tech voice recognition in my (at the time) Windows Mobile 6.5 phone worked beautifully! "Call mom" "Play the beatles", etc, it all worked w/o error.
For general purpose computing, no way would I develop something like this. Hack it into a media center though, then we're talking. One less remote to loose. Just say out loud what you want playing and enjoy. Maybe add in stock quotes or how the local forecast is as well.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
Speaking as someone who has worked in open plan offices and cubicles, this must be the daftest idea ever.
Why don't they rather concentrate on getting a "thought interface" working?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
'96 it shipped with OS/2 v4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Oh, it might work some of the time. But recognizing speech ... as compared to memorizing a bunch of data and humiliating the puny memory of human Jeopardy contestants ... is a massively complex task that humans do very, very well, and machines do only within very finite limits. Go outside those limits ... say, set up voice recognition on a quiet Sunday and then try to use it on a busy Monday with people, machines and the air conditioner on ... and it craps out. Get a cold ... it craps out. Change your mood ... it always shows in your voice and humans get it instantly ... and it craps out.
I bought a cellphone once. Not that long ago ...about five years. It was a Pay-As-You-Go phone you load up with minutes from time to time. This was with Bell (Canada). Loaded it up with minutes, made some calls, I'm a happy camper. Until I ran out of minutes, that is.
About this time Bell had some fancy, multimillion-dollar software and computer thing going. They'd been working on it for years. It was a voice recognition thing. They decided it was ready for prime time, and implemented it for voice calls to their support and ... Pay-As-You-Go phone minute reloading. I remember reading an article in the Globe & Mail (Toronto) with some Bell exec saying this was the greatest thing since individually wrapped cheeze in slices, Bell execs were so proud of this they were bragging about it in public, and it's the way they would be going system wide, as of ... right this very second.
Now, being a sociopathic corporation, they concluded they would not be able to fire a bunch of phone answering employees if nobody used it. Naturally, the way to do this was to eliminate ... completely ... any method to get a human on the phone for certain tasks ... like adding minutes to your Pay-As-You-Go phone, and also eliminating the old, alternate method using the phone keypad, which worked PERFECTLY. That's right ... you could not enter a CC number using the keypad, you could not talk to a human, you talked to this ***BITCH*** (... oops, sorry ) ... "computer generated sweet female voice" ... to renew your minutes.
Well, I tried. It actually worked, sort of. (See "Oh, it might work some of the time", above). But there were a number of steps that had to be done, and no matter how much I tried, really, really tried, this ***STunned C*NT*** (... oops, sorry) ... "computer generated sweet female voice" ... would eventually utter the dreaded words " I'm sorry, I didn't get that. Please try again." Of course, after three tries, she hangs up on you. Nice.
Well, at that point, you're done.
I probably made 30 calls to this robo-torture-queen before I finally just gave up. Couldn't return the phone, since it worked for the first two months before I ran out of minutes. Bell had no way ... I mean this ... to speak to a human about this. They cut off any and all methods to actual resolution ... I did send eMails, got answers, but the answer was this " use the robo-bitch. It's the only way. There are no humans available for the Pay-As-You-Go phone system. This eMail isn't even from them, since they don't accept eMails in that department either. Sorry."
Sold the phone. Put the loss I couldn't recover on the phone into my "Never Again, and this is why" file. Needless to say, Bell Canada has no chance of ever having me as a customer without employing some illegal scheme involving an offer of many, many blowjobs from a suitably attractive and youthful female "contract employee".
A few months later, Bell moved back to the old methods that actually worked, like using the phone's keypad. Idiots.
Now, some might say "that was five years ago" and you
I asked my Roomba, and she told me that it's a sign of mental instability.
it is easy to call phone companies.... real easy. They usually have an investor relations department so just call them. They also usually have a legal department and usually they are quite good at answering the phone. Its just the rest of the whole companies typically which stink.
Last time I had a run in... I called the legal department and advised that if they didn't deal with me I would file and then they would have to deal with me. They dealt with me and I didn't need to file. But no one else in the comapny was that nice.
Yup, that was a blast.
"Calculator". Up pops minesweeper. Oops, wrong program. "Close". Shutdown windows prompt appears. Close with mouse, also minesweeper.
"CALCULATOR". Oh look here's excel. Close with mouse.
"CAALCULAATOOOR". Minesweeper. Click.
"calculator". Control panel. Click.
"calcuLAYtor". Nothing.
"CALculator, oh ffs i'm giving up". Oh look here's calculator.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
The reason why talking to your computer is somewhat creepy is that we do perceive our computer as an extension of ourselves: the mouse pointer is "us" pointing, Google is an extension of our memory recall power, and so on. The interface is designed to be non-intrusive. Now, talking to your computer would become like talking to yourself. It's mildly creepy since it involves in the best case a split personality, or alternatively the feeling that you are the one who doesn't know squat, and has to ask to someone else. Not nice.
The approach is conceivably different when you ask "Earl Grey, hot". In that case you just give a command in order to receive an item, and who wouldn't want that?
Do not read this article!
There is no -1 Disagree.
It has been able to understand speech for some time now. It just doesn't answer, because it needs a driver upgrade.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUE6FVK1zJE
Buy it, use it, break it, fix it,
Trash it, change it, mail - upgrade it,
Charge it, pawn it, zoom it, press it,
Snap it, work it, quick - erase it,
Write it, cut it, paste it, save it,
Load it, check it, quick - rewrite it,
Plug it, play it, burn it, rip it,
Drag and drop it, zip - unzip it,
Lock it, fill it, call it, find it,
View it, code it, jam - unlock it,
Surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it,
Cross it, crack it, switch - update it,
Name it, rate it, tune it, print it,
Scan it, send it, fax - rename it,
Touch it, bring it, Pay it, watch it,
Turn it, leave it, start - format it.
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
-????!!!!
You can't handle the truth.
There have been chat bots online for a while now, elbot http://www.elbot.com/ is an amusing example. When the chatbots develop so that they pass the Turing Test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test then this will be a comfort to lonely nerds everywhere. Actually it can be fun to chat to chatbots, it is interesting when they are realistic.
It's not creepy. Just remember that whenever a computer appears to do a fancy or intelligent thing, it is only because a human instructed it to do so.
Yep, It's fine. Tell 'em what to do. They will be able to understand us. Great. Until the bastards initiate the conversation and start ordering us around.....
Many humans can't understand the dialect from my native region, the efforts of every speech recognition system I have come across so far has been laughably pitiful.
Note, you can personally improve computers understanding of swearing in many languages at voxforge: http://www.voxforge.org/ my last hope.
Deleted
"...talk to a computer and have it competently talk back."
I would be glad if I could talk to a human and have him COMPETENTLY talk back.
Voice recognition?
I'm Admin not you.
Computer!
Computer?
(picks up mouse)
Hello, Computer...
In an office Gesture based system would be the most annoying. On the odd occasion when I’ve sat near some deaf people signing I’ve found it drives my peripheral vision to distraction. It would take me a while getting used to people not sitting still all day.
:)
Although from childhood we are taught to sit still a not fidget so being still goes against our instinct. Moving about should help general obesity levels
I’d like voice command for games and it should be used along with a mouse.
“Select all red units”, “Attack this point.” Click.
“Build spices mine here”. Click.
“All units (type A) defend spice mine”
“War factory, build 10 tanks, Set way point here” Click.
“War Factory, reset way point here” Click.
Much better.
To quote a chalkboard comment made by someone in the class of '85 at the [long defunct] Wang Institute: "Natural language processing hard is."
I am the only one know knows someone with a severe disability, whos only real connection is with the full world is through his compute?. Before his condition deteriorated to the point where he cannot walk and use his hands very well, he was a technician.. He interfaces with the computer through voice, he tells it what applications to open, he dictates email and documents. He uses voice to organize pictures, interact with facebook, all the stuff any average computer use would do. It's actually quite neat how the software adapts to his voice and learns from its mistakes. It even recognizes my voice when I speak to it, and changes profiles for me. So I would say, talking to computers is more common than you think.
People think it's scary to talk to a woman who's oddly wearing boy-clothes then to have a man's voice answer them.
People think it's scary to talk to a woman for a year and then learn that she was assigned the male gender at birth.
People think it's scary to flirt with a girl and get her to giggle, and then when they excuse each other to go to the bathroom, the girl winds up in the same bathroom as the guy.
So, yes, I can see that people might find interacting with an object that's supposed to be one thing but is actually another scary.
Oh well, let's just have a pre-emptive Butlerian Jihad and we'll be all set.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Our speech is a culturally evolved natural capability of humans. Using speech implies the expectation of an intelligent human as a receiver, alleviating this problem by not trying to create the illusion of intelligence will nevertheless force people to use an intelligent, human ability in a degraded, humiliating way. Not even Artificial Intelligence which will probably create intelligent systems in maybe 30 years will essentially change the situation as it won't be expected behaviour these AI systems will be producing, there is currently no intention of creating anything having all limitations humans have. If, on the other hand, this changes, it might actually work, but you have to expect these systems to really not understand you and be unwilling to help or producing lots of errors if they have a bad day, perhaps because their lover broke up with them or the wages are to low.
One of my favorite things in Star Trek TNG was when Geordi would have fairly extended conversations with the computer.
Do I want to talk to a computer? The answer is yes and no. Yes, there are times when talking to a computer would be very handy. I do wish that I had a computer like those depicted in old sci fi shows, where I could be doing something around the house and just say, "Computer: what is the current relative humidity?" and it would just audibly respond with the answer.
In an office setting, or in public, however, I would definitely NOT want to be talking to the computer. Nor would I want to hear everyone else babbling to their computer. In those pre-texting days of a few years ago I used to despise cell phones because of having to listen to all the yammering. It really sucks to be standing in line waiting on your food order, while some insensitive twit is talking about aunt Sheila getting her boil lanced. Now that people text more than talk on their phones, it is quieter and less annoying.
Proverbs 21:19
Talking to the current crop of computers seems more than a bit embarrassing to me and always has. It's as if by talking to it, I am somehow telling those within listening range that I am stupid enough to imbue the mindless machine with humanlike properties - as if the computer has *me* fooled but not the other people who are feeling so sorry for me. Strangely, this feeling of embarrassment is present even when I am the only one in the room - as if I were standing outside myself, feeling sorry for the idiot that is treating a machine like a human being.
If computers were actually capable of perfectly emulating a human partner in a conversation, I imagine this feeling of embarrassment would either vanish or at least be greatly diminished. I would, after all, be conversing with what evidently is a human intelligence - if I closed my eyes I could not tell the difference.
But all embarrassment aside, it seems to me that as time goes on, computers and humans have developed incredibly efficient ways of accomplishing non-verbal communication - i.e. a simple click here, and tap of the keyboard there - abbreviated short hand on both input and output that is designed to convey the maximum amount of instruction and information with a minimum of effort. And I just bet that this evolved system of non-verbal man-machine communication is much more efficient that if we were to try to accomplish the same tasks using only verbal interaction.
It wants to subscribe to your newsletter.
I did a tech support stint at IBM back around 1995, and I got a copy of Warp 4 for $55 that was well supported on my PC, and I'll be damned but that voice control actually worked as advertised right out of the box. Doesn't surprise me big blue never gave up.
But I'm one of those people who thinks talking to computer and computers talking back is just a step below black magic, so I had to burn that computer, and unfortunately, I'm pretty sure Watson is a sign of the coming apocalypse, so that sucks.
I got your natural right here.
Get your dogma outta my yard!
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010320
... just annoying for me. Can you imagine being in a cube farm where everyone was interacting with their computer via voice? It's too horrifying to contemplate. I wouldn't even want to do it in the privacy of my own home. But then I'm big into peace & quiet.
... and correcting errors, though. My guess is that most "errors" in human speech are not even noticed by the recipient, because the listener's ability to take context into account "autocorrects" them. And humans are also better at the converse case - when they hear an error they can't fix, they are immediately able to flag it as an error and request clarification... rather than assuming that the speaker meant to be spouting gibberish.
1) Call me crazy, but I'd guess it'd be pretty easy for computers to track and refuse to respond to sound they're putting out of their own speakers. Though it'd be a fun prank if you could set up a login script to play a recording saying "computer, restart" and put it in an infinite loop.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
What if you are in a computer lab and click a youtube video that is a troll. It tells your computer to shut down with all of the necessary prompts. All of the computers in the lab shut down... except yours... problem not solved.
I think that the character Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver) said it best:
"Voice of Computer: Negative, there is no replacement Beryllium Sphere on board.
Gwen DeMarco: [to crew] No, there is no replacement Beryllium Sphere on board.
Tommy Webber: You know, that is really getting annoying!
Gwen DeMarco: [shouts] Look! I have one job on this lousy ship, it's *stupid*, but I'm gonna do it! Okay?
Tommy Webber: Sure, no problem. "
And expressed her frustration at the job well too:
"Gwen DeMarco: Fred, you had a part people loved. I mean, my TV Guide interview was six paragraphs about my BOOBS and how they fit into my suit. No one bothered to ask me what I do on the show.
Fred Kwan: You were... the umm, wait a minute, I'll think of it...
Gwen DeMarco: I repeated the computer, Fred. "
Keeping it in context, of course:
"[Trying to explain TV to the Thermians]
Gwen DeMarco: They're not ALL "historical documents." Surely, you don't think Gilligan's Island is a...
[All the Thermians moan in despair]
Mathesar: Those poor people. "
The disgruntled employee who's being escorted out of the HR office, and yells, "start! run! format c:, YES, YES, YES!!!"
mark "and then there's the English language*
* I read, er, have read, that the leading idea fell like a lead balloon....
Compare audio output to audio input to verify that the system is not listening to itself. Doesn't fix multiple systems, but it does solve the single-system issue.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
My Nexus S has Voice Actions which let you send texts to people (among other things) using only your voice.
But I don't use it. Because, yes, I feel weird talking to my phone.
The real reason many people find a computer talking back in normal speaking cadence is unsettling was demonstrated in the old Star Trek episode when M5 has communicated to the command that "Captain Dunsel" was in charge of the Enterprise.
Bad enough in the Star Trek universe, but maybe worse in our world, where being made obsolete might mean you don't eat.
Did you mean to say: "Destroy all humans!"
I find myself talking to my android phone on a pretty regular basis. Whenever I want to do an internet search that's more than a couple words, it's pretty fast and simple to hold down my search button and just speak the search phrase. The accuracy is pretty damn good even when speaking normally. The only problem is the background volume level; it doesn't work well in loud areas. It's great for the gps too: "navigate to 1122 Main St" "navigate to Joe's Bar". I don't see myself using this same technology with my work computer, but as far as my phone goes, I'm already talking to it and expecting it to react.
Prophetic words. Methinks most of the posters here are looking at the ever-receding past, not the future which laps at our ankles even now.
At First They Were Just Vacuum Cleaners
In a way, we already communicate to our computer to let it know what we want to do. Then it "replies" by doing whatever instruction we asked it to do. Regarding the actual topic, we just "teach" it to make human-like replies, so it's not particularly creepy.
I am not devoid of humor.
I have very little desire to use my desktop by voice. However, I wiould love to operate my phone by voice. Things I would like to do with a blue tooth head set and my phone:
1. While commuting to work.
"Marvin, wake up."
"Yes boss?"
"Email to Shirley Jones"
"Ready"
"Can we meet tomorrow on the status of the Filbert project." End message. Append times I've got open. Send.
"Sent. Next?"
"Memo to self: Investigate advantages of importing Japanese filbers. Remind me this aft at 2"
"You are meeting with John at 2:00"
"Fine. When I get back to the office after seeing John."
"Roger that. Next?
"go to sleep"
2. Inventory. Counting trees.
Spruce, whtie Block 17, 1 gallon pots, 12 to 16" tall, 24 rows of 18 each.
Spruce white, Block 18, 2 gallon pots, 18-30" tall, 40 rows of 12 each
Generally: Anytime I want to use a computer but a keyboard and rodent are impractical.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
OK, I missed the first show. I based my my post on something I heard one of the Engineers say on the second day, about it using a spoken word input. Either he misspoke, or I misunderstood. I am not perfect... so shoot me.
Willie...
I was recently informed that I must have misunderstood something one of the Engineers was saying on the 2'nd day. (I missed the 1'st day.) I got the impression from what he was saying, that Watson was receiving verbal input... so I was wrong. Shoot me.
Willie...
In that jeopardy game, the computer is not listening to the voice. It gets the questions from a data line, as ascii text. ... ... more than speech recognition
Talking with a computer is often just as frustrating as talking on the phone with someone using a computer
The only thing I do with voice on my computer is:
- a script that says the name of the dvd inserted when my laptop recovers from sleep mode. Great to not forget to bring the dvd back to the shop the morning after. (I work from home so no annoyed colleagues to fear)
- a bit of using the espeak command to show my kids how something is spoken in a language they learn at school
other than that, I keep dreaming that human/machine interface will improve, but somehow, I think it will come from head mounted displays, sight recognition, etc