Voice the new frontier

Amazon Echo has changed my worldview of technology. 

I do not make that statement lightly, having started my career coding GUI in C. It has been so long that the memory of drawing shapes on the screens, capturing mouse-down and mouse-up events was fun and exhilarating.  I was around to see the mouse work, GUI become really easy and program for touch with the advent of the iPhone.

The days of voice are here. Not a mere curiosity or geek-out fad; Voice Technology fundamentally changes the way technology interfaces with us humans. Yes, you read that right- the tables have turned and it is up to the machines to work with us in our ways of doing things.

The Approaches to voice technology.

Just over a month of research, has yielded two clear approaches to voice technology. 

1. Artificial Intelligence with Natural Language Processing (NLP)
2. Artificial Intelligence with Machine Perception (MP)

It is unfortunate that voice technology is clubbed into "Artificial Intelligence" in the sense that the advances seem lackluster in view of the grand objectives of AI. The strides have been great and deserve some more explanation. NLP according to wikipedia gives machines the ability to  read and "understand" the languages humans speak. This definition alludes to the fact that machines will have sufficient power and processing to just pick-up whatever we humans have created and use it right off the bat. I believe there is a lot of work to be done to realize this vision or might be a pipe dream.

MP working in the domain of speech recognition is the more promising technology and has caught my attention this past month. In the MP world, machines- imperfect as they might be are able to reasonably translate human utterances into text and act on the interpretation- provided we guide the machine appropriately. Amazon Echo is a clear demonstration of this technology at work.

E-marketer estimates about 2.9 million Amazon Echo devices being shipped. Throw-in the 100's of millions of iPhones with Siri and Android capable of Google Assistant and we have a voice market ripe for picking.

The Catch

Amazon Echo has demonstrated that with proper programming, you can get a lot done with the Voice User Interface. Programming is required; it is absolutely essential to design applications that cater to the Voice Interface. The machines adapting themselves to work with voice is not going to happen anytime soon. When the mouse came on the scene, we had to program the input to work with the click and double-click. The older generation Text did not do the job by itself- the same holds true for voice as an interface.

The Opportunity

I see a huge opportunity to convert applications over to voice. Applications that will work with various systems from several vendors deploying various strategies to appropriate the market for themselves. There will also be a open-source effort sometime very soon. Millions of people around the world will work to teach the machines to work with Voice and as the technology matures add more capabilities and simplify our lives. 

Get a Head Start

To benefit from this opportunity, i would invite you to get started. We will not be building an improved IVR or a more natural sounding robot. We have to start by learning the mechanics of conversation- an awareness of how we communicate, interact and work. This will enable us to build interactions the machines can follow to naturally satisfy users without using a screen, keyboard, touch, click or any other unnatural mechanism we invented to work around the technology limitations of the past century.

Join me on this journey of taking technology to everyone- the natural way.

Feedback and your experience with VUI is really appreciated.

#ConversationDesign