The Human Voice, as Game Changer

Nuance Communications (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A voice-enabled future

VLAD SEJNOHA is talking to the TV again.

O.K., maybe you’ve done that, too. But here’s the weird thing: His TV is listening.

“Dragon TV,” Mr. Sejnoha says to the screen, “find movies with Meryl Streep.” Up pops a list of films like “Out of Africa” and “It’s Complicated.”

“Dragon TV, change to CNN,” he says. Presto — the channel flips to CNN.

Mr. Sejnoha is sitting in what looks like a living room but is, in fact, a sort of laboratory inside Nuance Communications, the leading force in voice technology, and the speech-recognition engine behind Siri, the virtual personal assistant on the Apple iPhone 4S.

Here, Mr. Sejnoha, the company’s chief technology officer, and other executives are plotting a voice-enabled future where human speech brings responses from not only smartphones and televisions, cars and computers, but also coffee makers, refrigerators, thermostats, alarm systems and other smart devices and appliances.

It is a wildly disruptive idea. But such systems are already beginning to change the way we interact with the world and, for better and worse, how we think about technology. Until now, after all, we’ve talked only to one another. What if we begin talking to all sorts of machines, too — and, like Siri, those machines respond as if they were human?

Granted, people have been talking into machines and at machines since the days of Edison’s phonograph. By the 1980s, commercial speech recognition systems had become sophisticated enough to transcribe spoken words into text. Today, voice technology is a fixture of many companies’ customer-service operations, albeit an occasionally maddening one.

But now the race is on to make the voice the sought-after new interface between us and our technology. The results could rival innovations like the computer mouse and the graphic icon and, some experts say, eventually pose challenges for giants like Google by bypassing their traditional search engines.