Voice-enabled
personal avatars will talk and listen to us by 2010
By Dick
Pelletier
Throw away the mouse and keyboard. New
technologies are about to provide us with personal avatars – computerized images
of our choice – connected to the Internet, and displayed on wall-size screens.
Avatars will understand us, listen to our demands, and anticipate our needs.
Most people think interactive systems like
these are a long ways off, but two trends are quickening the pace. Improved
speech-recognition systems will soon enable people to converse with computers in
normal-spoken English, and entrepreneurs are flooding to the Internet creating
new business applications that take advantage of speech recognition.
IBM and Microsoft expect to soon eliminate all
of the errors in today’s speech recognition software, and create systems that
will mimic human speech perfectly without flaws. The MIT Project Oxygen new
voice-machine interface can look you in the eye, let you ask questions in casual
English, and answer them. Close your eyes and you think you’re talking with a
human.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates claims that by
2010, voice-enabled "smart” systems will allow us to converse naturally and
comfortably, directly to flat panel displays. On command, our personal avatar
will appear on the display. She (or he) will help us shop, work, learn, and
conduct business and social relationships on the Internet. Computers will
disappear and become part of the display.
Amtrak, Wells Fargo, and Land’s End are taking
advantage of these new systems. They plan to replace keypad-menu call centers
with speech-recognition systems to save money and improve customer relations.
General Motors OnStar and Lexus DVD Nav systems are adding more than 1 million
new subscribers each year. Analysts believe most businesses will convert to
automatic speech systems as the technology matures.
Financial experts predict we are entering a
transition, similar to the PC revolution of the 80s, and the Internet rush of
the 1990s. Today’s recession may hang around for a while, they say, but
automatic speech systems could soon provide a huge boost for the economy.
Avatars will soon be appearing everywhere. In
Japan, Yuki Terai thrills as a virtual rock star and is a national idol, Ananova
gained notoriety reporting the weather, and AI expert Ray Kurzweil created
Ramona, an alter-ego that hosts his web site and has performed live on stage.
We will soon be using avatars to help us buy
and sell online, become better educated, receive medical help, and talk with
distant friends. Real-life images on wall-size displays will make us feel like
we are in the same room with the person we’re talking with.
We can design avatars to resemble anyone. My
choices: Meg Ryan as she appeared in "Sleepless in Seattle”, and Ted Turner (my
hero). How about you – what would your choices be?
Speech-recognition technologies are inching us
closer to our "magical” future, discussed in previous articles: driverless cars
scurrying us around, scramjets whisking us to anywhere on earth in an hour, gene
therapies growing our body into better health, and personal robots making life
more enjoyable.
Learn more: futurist.com, wikipedia.com, microsoft.com,
kurzweilai.net, oxygen.lcs.mit.edu,
This article appeared in various print publications and
on-line blogs. Comments always welcome
