The New Developments in Mobile Speech Recognition

No matter how hard my mother tries, she simply cannot seem to master the QWERTY keyboard on her phone. Her face wracks with concentration as she takes the time to position her fingers in the exact position to meticulously hit each correct key, the frustration visible whenever she makes a mistake. Thankfully, with the rise of mobile voice recognition technology, the need for touch based input may become a thing of the past.

As the technology behind the mobile speech recognition gets more advanced, companies are finding new ways to integrate speech recognition technology into mobile devices, making it easier and more intuitive to navigate everyday life. Here are the some of the latest trends that show that mobile voice recognition is about to change the world:

Mobile Banking

A big step being made by the mobile voice recognition system is within the banking and finance sector. Companies such as Wells Fargo are seeking to develop technology that would allow customers to check their account balances, transfer money, or conduct other types of transactions through voice commands. Not only will this raise customer satisfaction by making the online banking process easier and more efficient, it also helps the companies as they save money by reducing the amount of people who would need to contact call centres for help as the new smart technology could provide the necessary answers to their questions.

Gaming

Gaming is another frontier that mobile voice recognition is quickly integrating with. Instead of having to deal with pesky buttons to play your game, some games like the Reach for the Top trivia game allow players to  use voice commands in order play the game, interpreting your answer and getting rid of those pesky spelling mistakes that may cause you to lose points. Microsoft is currently hoping to transfer the speech recognition features on its Xbox gaming console to its Windows phones in a bid to allow users to more easily play their games on mobile devices. Other gaming companies are also joining the bandwagon in incorporating speech into their gameplay.

Transcription

Possibly one of the brightest areas for mobile voice recognition technology is transcription. Even with the advances of voice recognition capabilities, the ability to accurately translate speech into text still faces many hurdles. However, the software that has worked so well in PCs and laptops is soon coming to the mobile arena. Users will see Dragon software on their mobiles to assist with voice transcription. Dragon is the leading software for PCs and has a much more advanced ability to adapt to user’s speech patterns to produce legible text.

Moving away from the cloud

In the near future, more cell phones will stop needing to rely on the cloud to provide voice recognition processing. While popular mobile voice recognition systems such as Apple’s Siri and Google Now are getting better at understanding speech, the problem is that they rely on the cloud to do their processing. This is necessary because speech recognition requires a lot of processing power, which is limited due to the small size of most mobile devices. Of course, this brings with it the drawback that unless you are actually connected to the internet, you cannot access speech recognition features. For many people in areas with limited or non-existent internet infrastructure, this renders the voice recognition useless. However, Intel is among the first to produce a mobile chip that powers speech recognition locally, meaning that you can conduct important activities such as dictating a message without being connected to the internet. The localised chip also provides much quicker and more responsive speech processing due to the fact that they do not have to connect to the internet and wait to receive a result

Mobile speech recognition is happening. It may seem like a very foreign concept to us now, but it’s exciting to imagine how much more efficient it will be to do away with so much typing.