Voice Recognition in the Future

Voice recognition is an emerging technology in development for years and more popular than it has ever been. Those who have recently purchased a computer may be familiar with it, as the Vista operating system comes pre-installed with Windows Speech Recognition. Others with a keen interest in the technology turn to more efficient programs, such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking by Nuance, a program that is a major upgrade from IBM ViaVoice, which first hit the market in the early 90s. Indeed, voice recognition has come a long way over the years but what does it hold for the future? Let's have a look.

Voice Recognition in Robots

As you read this, robotic android projects are being developed in the United States and Japan. These projects revolve around facial mirroring, where the goal is for humans to form emotional bonds with the machines they interact with. Voice recognition is obviously just one of many elements here, as the projects are based in large part on behavior. If you smile at the android while having a conversation and it smiles back, this enhances the emotional value which could lead the robot to compliment you. If you are not so polite to the system, it would mirror that behavior, returning an angry response or perhaps trying to diffuse the negative situation. This of course will depend on programming, but you can see where developers are looking to go with voice recognition.

You may remember Hal, the renown computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the science fiction movie, this computer was able to speak rather fluently with its master Dave. While this was simply the magic of Hollywood at the time, today's scientists are trying to make it more of a reality. It would safe to say that we are half way there as the current voice recognition programs are able to sense emotion, aggression, anger, hesitation and hostility. In the next few years, these types of features should be increasingly present in voice recognition applications.

Voice Recognition in Haptics

Voice and facial recognition is also being developed in Haptics, another area of science. This leads some to belief that robots in the future may look similar to humans and mimic our characteristics. Perhaps a machine that detects a strong, firm handshake and a confident voice would enhance the trust factor between the two. When looking at the scenario from this angle, voice recognition could be quite scary. Just think - if a machine has the ability to determine levels of confidence, it could possibly replace managers, executives and CEOs as well. Some are worrying that 10 to 15 years down the line, there could be great conflict amongst man and machine.

If everything goes accordingly to plan, voice recognition will be far more advanced in the very near future. As you can imagine, there are still a few kinks to get out of the technology, but in the next five years or so, voice recognition and AI software developers should have the issues squared away. Let's hope so as we want the relationship between man and machine to be as seamless as possible.