Programming Voice Interfaces

Chapter 1. Introduction to Voice Interfaces and the IoT

Bell Labs engineer Homer Dudley invented the first speech synthesis machine, titled “Voder,” in the early scientific technical revolution days of 1937. Based on his earlier work in 1928 on vocoder (voice encoder) Dudley put together gas tubes, a foot pedal, 10 piano-like keys, and various other components designed to work in harmony to produce human speech from synthesized sound. Then in 1962, at the Seattle World’s Fair, IBM introduced the first speech recognition machine called “IBM Shoebox,” which understood a whopping 16 spoken English words.

Despite the vast experience of these great institutions, the evolution of synthesized speech and recognition would be slow and steady. In addition to advancements in other technological areas, it would take another 49 years for voice to be widely adopted and accepted. Before Apple’s Siri came into the market in 2011, the general population was fed up with voice interfaces, having to deal with spotty voice “options” where we would end up dialing “0” for an operator on calls made to a bank or insurance company.

Both voice interfaces (VI), historically referred to as voice user interfaces (VUI), as well as the Internet of Things (IoT) have been around for many years now in various shapes and sizes. These systems, backed by machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and other advances in cognitive computing as well as the rapid decline in hardware costs and the extreme ...