While NUIs consist of many interfaces wrapped in a multitude of technologies and sensors, this book will focus primarily on our natural ability to speak, listen, and verbally communicate with one another and machines. As engineers and makers, we wonder what it will take to get there. Hopefully one day we will have figured out how the wand chooses the wizard.Īs futurists, we dream of all the wonderful technologies that will be available in the years and decades to come. Clarke declared, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”-and we are surely headed in that direction. And with a MYO armband, you can control the world around you with a mere wave of your hand. Apply Emotiv’s Insight EEG headset and you can control your PC with your thoughts. With the introduction of devices such as the Amazon Echo or Google Home, we’ve essentially added a natural interface, such as voice, to our everyday lives. An early example of a NUI is the touchscreen, which allowed users to control graphical user interfaces (GUIs) with the touch of their finger. NUI essentially refers to interfaces that are natural in human-to-human communications versus the artificial means of human-to-machine interfacing such as using a keyboard or mouse. The physical structures themselves will be able to recognize who you are, hold conversations and carry out commands, understand basic human needs, and react autonomously on our behalf-all while we use our natural human senses such as sight, sound, touch, and voice as well as the many additional human traits such as walking, waving, and even thinking to connect with this new, natural user interface (NUI)-enabled smart world. Soon, ubiquitous conversational interfaces will be all around us, from appliances and office buildings to vehicles and public spaces. You’ve heard the news and read the articles: technology is evolving and expanding at such an exponential rate that it’s just a matter of time before machines, humans, and the world around us are completely in sync. With this in mind, feel free to jump to Chapter 3 to start coding or continue reading here for a primer on voice interfaces and the Internet of Things-we’ll look at how they complement each other and most importantly, some design principles to help you create pleasant, non-annoying conversational voice experiences. We will attempt to limit general theories, design patterns, and high-level overviews of voice interfaces and IoT to Chapters 1 and 2, while focusing on actual hands-on development and implementation in the subsequent chapters. Lastly, we’ll attempt to explain how we as makers and developers can bring them together in a single functional product that you can continue to build long after you’ve finished reading these pages. In this book, we bring to light some of the modern implementations of both technological marvels, VI and IoT, as we explore the multitude of integration options out in the wild today. Nowadays, developers can easily integrate voice into their own devices with very little understanding of natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS), and all of the other acronyms that make up today’s voice-enabled world. These systems, backed by machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and other advances in cognitive computing as well as the rapid decline in hardware costs and the extreme minification of components, have all led to this point. Before Apple’s Siri came into the market in 2011, the general population was fed up with voice interfaces, having to deal with spotty voice “options” where we would end up dialing “0” for an operator on calls made to a bank or insurance company.īoth voice interfaces (VI), historically referred to as voice user interfaces (VUI), as well as the Internet of Things (IoT) have been around for many years now in various shapes and sizes. In addition to advancements in other technological areas, it would take another 49 years for voice to be widely adopted and accepted. Then in 1962, at the Seattle World’s Fair, IBM introduced the first speech recognition machine called “IBM Shoebox,” which understood a whopping 16 spoken English words.ĭespite the vast experience of these great institutions, the evolution of synthesized speech and recognition would be slow and steady. Based on his earlier work in 1928 on vocoder (voice encoder) Dudley put together gas tubes, a foot pedal, 10 piano-like keys, and various other components designed to work in harmony to produce human speech from synthesized sound. Introduction to Voice Interfaces and the IoTīell Labs engineer Homer Dudley invented the first speech synthesis machine, titled “Voder,” in the early scientific technical revolution days of 1937.
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