CHAPTER 7LET’S TALK – THE POWER OF VOICE
Voice technology, encompassing a broad spectrum of applications from voice recognition to natural language processing, has significantly transformed our interaction with digital devices and services. Most of us have used a voice tool at some point – Siri on Apple, Google Assistant on Android, or Alexa on an Amazon device.
I experimented with voice synthesis in my teens, using a Commodore 64 computer and playing with very early speech-to-text programs. I remember the very first time that I managed to get my computer to “speak” to me in a very robotic voice. It was exciting to think I could task a computer to mimic human behaviour.
Later, I experimented with voice transcription programs such as Dragon Dictate.1 The technology at the time was ground-breaking but required the user to extensively “train” the software to recognise their voice. Today’s systems – which require no training at all and can recognise a variety of accents, languages, and dialects – are a testament to how far this technology has come over the last 30 years.
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