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Ask Slashdot: Is There a Useful Voice-Activated PC? (dailycaring.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
My elderly monther-in-law misses her computer. Her mind is okay, but she cannot use a computer because of her Parkinson's disease.
I am not all that impressed with Amazon Echo. Seems you can ask the Echo for the time of day, or the weather outside, but it will not do anything useful -- like send an email. A voice controlled PC would be great, even if it only did a few simple tasks.
The original submission ends with a question: "Is there such a thing?" So leave your best thoughts and suggestions in the comments. Is there a useful voice-activated PC?
I am not all that impressed with Amazon Echo. Seems you can ask the Echo for the time of day, or the weather outside, but it will not do anything useful -- like send an email. A voice controlled PC would be great, even if it only did a few simple tasks.
The original submission ends with a question: "Is there such a thing?" So leave your best thoughts and suggestions in the comments. Is there a useful voice-activated PC?
Not a direct answer, but perhaps helpful -- there is some promising work being done with tremor compensation/cancellation technology. Strap on a bracelet with a type of vibrator attached and it can stabilize your hand movements, kind of like camera stabilization does for taking pictures.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/projects-backed-by-google-and-microsoft-are-tackling-parkinsons-disease/
The problem is people in general are lazy and do not want to spend the time needed to train the system for each person so we need the raw power of powerful servers to do general voice processing.
We actually don't, you know.
Anyone using Siri can tell you that the local phone screen already displays the text of your query while it's going off to ask Apple's servers what to do, and still displays it when it comes back with "Oops, we seem to be having communication problems. Please try again later."
In other words the speech-to-text conversion has already happened on the phone. Apple's servers are just applying Natural Language Processing techniques on the text to figure out what the request means. This is also something that could happen on the phone, Apple just wants a view into everyone's lives.