Language, the Final Frontier

It seems to be the general trend in everything. The microprocessor-software combo seems to do most things that was done by humans much faster and way better. Except language. That’s one area that still resists the tech juggernaut. Items related to language, like translations and speech, seem too tough to crack.

Let’s start with translation. Word Lens, an app developed for the iPhone, became very famous due to videos like this:

Point your phone, take a picture and voila! The translated text appears. Awesome, isn’t it (even if it only worked between English and Spanish)? People certainly thought so and shelled out money to buy the app. Which is when the complaints started: the translations weren’t always right. Nor were they context sensitive.

Google Translate creates and scans (massive) databases, and then applies algorithms to decide (guess?) which words mean the same thing in different languages. Now Google’s taken it to the next level by combing translations with speech recognition:



Nice, especially when you don’t know the language of the place. But not perfect. But unlike Word Lens, Google Translate is free, so we’re more tolerant of its failures.

So then speech recognition that’s almost AI like should be far, far away, right? Well, Apple’s given it a shot. The iPhone 4S’s voice assistant, Siri, tries taking it to that next level:

But users say that Siri makes mistakes quite often. Apple knew that Siri wasn’t perfect, and even added humorous responses for some questions. Like if you keep prodding Siri to tell you a story, then (after repeatedly asking it), Siri’ll tell you this story:

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 3, 2011 at 4:11 PM

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    ReplyDelete

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