Today as I lay sick in our living room and watching the television, while surfing through several channel I found a very informative discussion regarding technology. I will not mention the title of the show and it was a rerun of previous episode. I always watch this show whenever it is possible. This episode that I was watching was about the Apple 4S and one of newest feature the SIRI voice application. The host and the guest where demonstrating how the voice application works, apparently there are three ways to activate the voice application, but once activity the owner needs only to press the middle button and speak then the voice would reply to the command or inquiry. Since I do not know how advance this voice recognition application from Apple, I watched to find out more. As the demonstration goes on, all the command and inquiry ask through the voice application was answered, yep it was all answered. I was pretty much surprise for these level of technology for this kind of voice application.
What made it made advanced was while demonstrating the voice application, another Smartphone with another voice application was brought and these too were tested and again to my surprise this one failed miserably why? Because the few question that was ask by the host thru the phone, the voice application wasn’t able to answer any of them, not a single one was answer, also what is more apparent between the two voice application and Smartphone was the time it takes to process the voice command and inquiry while the SIRI voice application was responding in time much a like talking to a normal person, the other voice application on the other Smartphone was really taking too long and most of the time would be cancelled by the person on the show. Also the Apple I phone 4S was much faster in response time. Too bad for me it was a re-run and the show was cut from airing.
Image by planetc1 via FlickrBut based from that few minutes of demonstration I was quickly reminded of another television show back in the early 90’s this television show was called “Star Trek: TNG” and on the show they have one central components that held it all together from the starship to the star bases and all the type of handheld gadget in that show one central component stand out from the rest and that is they fondly name and called the “Computer” which has the voice of a woman. How do they used this technology if you are a fan of the star trek TNG as I am, you will knew that they first address the computer before they issue a task for it. They would say “Computer” and then followed by the command or task they want the computer to perform and after performing the task of command the computer will response with the proper action or will ask for additional information.
if the present information is not complete of sufficient for the task or command to be completed. Now based from the show that I just watched we have really come in a long way from science fiction technology to real technology. Although SIRI is not named computer, this voice application still reside and used the computer power of a small handheld device and is generally categorized as a computer. Now you the very eerie resemblance between Apple I phone 4S SIRI voice application and Star Trek’s Computer, although the level of artificial intelligence is still a big gap but these voice applications is definitely on the right path of getting there together of course with the development of the hardware side.
