Do you not get majorly jealous of Iron Man when he is able to have a full length conversation with Jarvis, where you are stuck trying to tell Siri you want to set an alarm for 6:30 am tomorrow?
Well look no further, because Intel wants to process your voice right here, instead of in the cloud.
And by ‘in the cloud’, I mean that when you make a voice command into your phone, it sends your command to a computer (hundreds and thousands of miles away, may I add) much much stronger and faster than your phone and/or gaming console – which then converts your command to text.
In an interview with a technology blog, Intel’s head of wearables Mike Bell has confessed to have partnered an unnamed third party to put that company’s voice recognition software on Intel mobile processors powerful enough to parse the human voice but small enough to fit in the device that’s listening, no round trip to the cloud required. The result is a prototype wireless headset called “Jarvis” that sits in the wearer’s ears and connects to his or her smartphone.
Not only is Intel’s voice recognition solution more responsive than those offered by its cloud-obsessed competitors, but it also leads to what Bell calls “graceful degradation,” which means that it works even when the phone it’s connected to is not online. Bell says,
How annoying is it when you’re in Yosemite and your personal assistant doesn’t work because you can’t get a wireless connection? It’s fine if [voice recognition systems] can’t make a dinner reservation because the phone can’t get to the cloud, but why can’t it get me Google Maps on the phone or turn off the volume?
It has been found out that people do not want to wait more than 3 or 4 seconds when they have really just commanded their phone to set a reminder to Sanjay.
For true voice interaction with computers, the kind that involves clarifications and a genuine dialogue, our devices are going to have to respond to our voice just as quickly as a human would—or even faster.
Bell says that Intel is working on selling its voice recognition technology to unnamed mobile phones manufacturers, which could allow them to differentiate themselves from Apple and Google’s usual offerings—or the tech could go into phones by those companies.
I cannot wait to have actual conversations with my phone!!!!