Google Working On Siri Competitor Majel

judgecorp writes "Google is working on a competitor to Apple's Siri voice input system. It's an extension to its existing Voice Actions offering with a name that should ring bells. Majel is named after Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who was the voice of most of the Star Trek on-board computers, as well as playing Nurse Christine Chapel in the first series and being Gene Roddenberry's wife."

Comments

Applaud the respect

[AikonMGB]

I absolutely love the use of "Majel" here; Star Trek has influenced so much of our lives and of our tech, and now that are finally starting to get into responsive voice-operated systems, it shows a great deal of respect to bring it back to the original visionaries.

Aikon-

Too bad the real Majel isn't around to voice it

[msobkow]

It's really a shame that Majel herself isn't still alive to provide the core voice work for the product. People would have swarmed in droves to have the actual Star Trek computer voice at their beck and call.

Then again, who knows how much audio tape and footage there is of her locked away? Maybe there's enough of a phoneme and phrase collection out there that they could resurrect her voice. Couldn't be any more difficult than extracting the phonemes from someone else's voice, provided there's enough data to do the job.