I was thinking about Henry Higgins from the movie My Fair Lady the other night. There was a scene in which he asked a friend to count how many vowels he was saying in one breath. It sounded like a stream of vowels morphing from one to the next. Being a phoneticist, Professor Higgins took pride in his capability of distinguishing one vowel from another. The nerdy side of this pompous man somehow made him endearing to me.
What got me thinking about 'enry 'iggins was the fact that we live in a very interesting time. We have voice recognition that does a pretty good job of learning a speaker's voice. Even Eliza Doolittle, with her Cockney English, would probably have no trouble getting a smartphone to recognize what she was saying.
Sometimes I wonder if the whole idea of voice command originated from Star Trek. I'm sure it came about much earlier than that, but the idea certainly came to the forefront of most people's consciousness when Scotty picked up a mouse and said, "Hello computer!"
What was considered science fiction in 1986 (when Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home came out) has become a reality. Google, Microsoft, and Apple all have their own versions of voice search. We ask our smartphone, tablet, or in-car GPS system questions and expect a somewhat reasonable answer. But how does it all happen?
Simply put, voice command is another form of machine translation. Instead of translating a sentence from, say, English to French, the machine translates the sentence into something computers can understand: code.
Programming languages are similar to spoken and written languages in that they have a set of rules and sentence structures to follow. Therefore it's not much of a stretch to want to "translate" human words into something computers can "understand" and take action from. We can't all be software programmers, who have learned how to speak the computers' languages, and write code to tell machines what to do. Luckily we don't have to. Voice command is like our own interpreter that talks to the computers on our behalf.
It's a pretty exciting time we live in, wouldn't you agree?
Please translate responsibly.
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