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When Will My Computer Understand Me?
aarondubrow writes "For more than 50 years, linguists and computer scientists have tried to get computers to understand human language by programming semantics as software, with mixed results. Enabled by supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas researchers are using new methods to more accurately represent language so computers can interpret it. Recently, they were awarded a grant from DARPA to combine distributional representation of word meanings with Markov logic networks to better capture the human understanding of language."
Actually, that would be considerably easier and cheaper to implement.
Instead of trying to build computers that can understand us, we should be building computers that can learn based on stimuli. If a computer can somehow see, and hear, at the very least and it could somehow capture this information and then over time, develop algorithms to make sense of these things. You know.. the code it would generate could then be used ... Anyways, sounds crazy, but, to me, it makes more sense that way. After all, we didn't just 'communicate' instantly, we learned over time.
But let's say, um, hypothetically and all, that a... ah... friend happened to have recordings of a few hundred million people's phone calls and needed a giant computer to be able to interpret them....
Of course, that depends on what's going on.
(While wearing my bluetooth headset and working on my car)
"Siri, How'd the Patriots do?"
"They beat the Jets 52-10."
"Woohoo!"
Or stop working on my car, dig for my cellphone and either launch an app for sports scores (which I have to have on my phone) or launch Safari and search (ie, type) "Patriots Jets" and hope that Google is clever enough to figure out what I want and will put it on the search results.
I agree that if I want to know the details of the game--number of butt fumbles, interceptions, and what-not--I'm going for the App. But just to get quick answers, voice is far more convenient.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I'm struck by how much more accurate and responsive Dragon Naturally Speaking was in 1999 on my Pentium 2 than is Siri on my iPhone 5 and Apple's cloud servers today. Maybe it's a microphone problem, but in that case why was the $4.99 tiny microphone from Radioshack in 1999 better than the microphone in my iPhone 5 today?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Totally depends what you're doing. I can tell Siri "Remind me to call my mom when I get home", and she does it. If I were to input this without voice, It would require me to open up menus to the reminder app, tell the system who I'd like to call, that I'd like a location-based reminder, and what that location is (though I'm not sure iOS can do this without Siri). Even if there were a macro for it, it wouldn't be any faster than asking Siri outright by voice.
There are absolutely things that are easier to do by hand, but voice certainly has advantages.
Yes, computationalism is long dead. Now, can we stop using the term AI? Keeping the term around serves only to further confuse the general public and decision-makers both public and private. I'd go as far as to say that the continued misuse of the term is precisely what has kept the cranks and con artists in business!
Required reading for internet skeptics
But in reality voice limits input
Only if you have to talk to it like you're giving input to a computer.
Imagine instead that you're talking to a person, and not just any person, but a person who has the world's knowledge at his fingertips and knows you as well as a highly competent personal assistant. Rather than asking for your team scores, you'd say "Giants?" and you'd get back the most interesting points (to you) about the game. Follow that with "anything else?" and you'd get a rundown on the rest of the sports, focusing on the parts that most interest you.
Voice input with contextual awareness, understanding of the world, and personalization will blow away anything else in terms of input speed, accuracy and effectiveness.
Modern GUI's can present a lot more data faster than using voice to ask for the data
You're conflating two issues here. One is input, the other is output. Nothing is likely to ever be as efficient as voice for input. I'm a pretty fast typist and not a particularly fast speaker, but I talk a lot faster than I type, even on a nice full-sized keyboard. Output is a different issue. Text and imagery has much higher information bandwidth than voice. However, you can't always look at a screen, so being able to use voice output at those times is still very valuable.
Even now, I find my phone's voice input features to be extremely useful. Earlier today I was a little late picking up my son from karate. While driving, I told my phone "call origin martial arts". Now, I don't have an address book entry for Origin, in fact I've never called them before. But my phone googled it, determining that the intended "Origin Martial Arts" is the one near my home, and dialed the phone number for me. That's just the most recent example, but I use voice queries with my phone a half-dozen times per day because it's faster and easier than typing or because I'm doing something that doesn't permit me to manipulate the phone a lot.
Voice is the ultimate input mechanism for most humans. Right now it's pretty good (especially if you use Google's version of it; Siri is kind of lame), and it's going to get much, much better.
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