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The Uncanny Valley of Voice Recognition
An anonymous reader writes: We've often seen the term "uncanny valley" applied to the field of robotics — it's easy to get unsettled when robots act close to being human, yet fail completely in a few key ways. GitHub Engineer Zach Holman writes that we've now reached uncanny valley territory in speech recognition as well, though the results are more frustrating than they are disturbing. He says, "Part of this frustration is the user interface itself is less standardized than the desktop or mobile device UI you're used to. Even the basic terminology can feel pretty inconsistent if you're jumping back and forth between platforms.
Siri aims to be completely conversational: Do you think the freshman Congressman from California's Twelfth deserved to sit on HUAC, and how did that impact his future relationship with J. Edgar? Xbox One is basically an oral command line interface, of the form: Xbox (direct object). ...it's these inconsistencies that are frustrating as you jump back and forth between devices. And we're only going to scale this up."
Siri aims to be completely conversational: Do you think the freshman Congressman from California's Twelfth deserved to sit on HUAC, and how did that impact his future relationship with J. Edgar? Xbox One is basically an oral command line interface, of the form: Xbox (direct object). ...it's these inconsistencies that are frustrating as you jump back and forth between devices. And we're only going to scale this up."
As I understand it, the "Uncanny Valley" refers to things are that very close to human behavior--close enough that the mind shifts from this being an imperfect representation of a human to being an imperfect human.
Personally, I'm not sure there would really be an issue with "uncanny valley" in regards to speech recognition. It's good if it recognizes what you're saying. It's bad if it doesn't. There isn't really a middle ground where it's off in a way you can't really identify, which is where "uncanny valley" comes from.
What he seems to be talking about is the "personification" of "digital assistants" like Siri and Alexa (Amazon Echo) which will eventually create an "uncanny valley." But I'm not sure that it's really that big of an issue. Just because I call something by name doesn't mean I expect it to behave in a human fashion. I don't get frustrated with my dog when I say, "Fido, change the oil in my car" and the dog just lies there and licks his balls, so I don't expect I'll ever get that frustrated because Siri can't tell me what time the sun will set next Tuesday--or, if I do, my frustration will be aimed at the people at Apple who believe that sunrise and sunset is part of the weather.
Siri and Alexa have a long way to go before someone would mistake them for humans.