While industry giants such as Apple have already made big waves with voice recognition software like “Siri,” other smaller technology companies have been close at their heels with similar technology that can be applied to gadgets outside the smartphone and even to appliances in the home.
Palo Alto-based tech startup Wit.ai is working hard to create an affordable platform from which software developers and hardware makers can add custom voice controls to devices such as smartwatches, drones, connected thermostats and yes, even home appliances.
At this time, the service is offered at no charge to anyone who agrees to share user data with the larger Wit.ai community. The goal of this data collection, according to CEO and co-founder Alex Lebrun, is to improve the accuracy of the system over time.
So, how does it work? Using the service, developers input commands for Wit.ai to recognize and denote what they’d like the system to accomplish through each command. For example, by typing “Wake me up in 30 minutes” into the system, and alerting Wit.ai to correspond that command to the action of setting the alarm on a smart watch, a user can later issue that command to that connected watch and expect it to act upon that command. At this time, nearly 5,000 developers are using the service with mobile apps, robots, home automation, and wearable devices.
Taking it one step further, Wit.ai also has the capability of using what it knows about language to decipher the different ways a command might be expressed, and to correlate those commands with device actions.
Recently, a University of Waterloo (Ontario) student put the system to the test. Along with some classmates, he added the voice recognition technology to a microwave. By inputting a series of commands into the system, as well as targets that could be mapped to a list of recipes on a remote server, users were then able to request that the microwave “cook some bacon,” prompting the microwave to turn itself on, then set itself to the right power level and time.
However, the system does have a few hurdles to overcome before it’s ready for mass consumption. First, it won’t work without an Internet connection. Second, since it’s cloud-based, the system can sometimes be slow to respond. And while Wit.ai does have the capability to operate in other languages, data sharing thus far has made it much stronger in English than in any other language.
Language interpretation issues aside, this technology allows your microwave to COOK BACON without ever having to push any buttons!
Via Mashable. Photo via Google Images.
Advertisement
Learn more about Electronic Products Magazine
