- #Amazon has the best voice recognition software movie#
- #Amazon has the best voice recognition software software#
Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The GuardianĪnd, in fairness, that isn’t the only downside to living with a voice-activated assistant. The Google Assistant app: ‘If anything, it’s too eager to please’. We’ve always drilled politeness into him, making sure he remembers to say please and thank you, but I wonder what will happen when he realises he can get whatever he wants by barking demands at the cylinder in the corner? In an ideal world, the Echo would have a setting that only responds to impeccable manners, but for now we’re having to go through the rigmarole of diligently setting an example by please-and-thank-youing Alexa whenever we want anything, as anachronistically as if we still answered the phone with “ahoy-hoy”. The concept of voice recognition is already hardwired into his being in a way that makes me slightly uncertain. He’s also started to address the television as “Lexa”, and I think I caught him shouting at the kitchen clock the other day as well. That’s probably only the tip of the iceberg. The second he cracks that first syllable our lives will thrum with a cacophony of endless nursery rhymes. “LEXA!” he’s fruitlessly started to scream, “PLAY OLD MACDONALD HAD A FARM E-I-E-I-O AND ON THAT FARM HE HAD A HORSE …” This is because he doesn’t yet know the difference between a song title and the entirety of a song’s lyrics, and neither can he pronounce “Alexa” properly. He’s heard us talk to Alexa so often he thinks humanity has always had the ability to retrieve music by yelling at a box. But to my two-year-old son, it’s simply the way the world has always been.
#Amazon has the best voice recognition software movie#
To me, a 37-year-old man who had to queue to enter a special room decked out like a bunker just to use the internet at university, voice recognition still feels like every sci-fi movie rolled into one. Alexa does the job so well I’d be willing to bet that she’ll be named as a contributing factor in a divorce one dayįrom this vantage point, at least, it seems like a permanent step forward. What started off as the alien novelty of Siri has now started to sew itself into society. To top it off, the best character from the year’s best sitcom – Janet from The Good Place – is basically a walking, talking Amazon Echo. As well as the Echo – and competitors like Google Home – you can now buy voice-activated remote controls, voice-activated alarm clocks, voice-activated watches, voice-activated lightbulbs, voice-activated vacuum cleaners and, thanks to some dark sorcery I’m not sure I understand, a voice-activated motorcycle helmet. By all accounts, 2017 will go down as the year that voice recognition went mainstream. So I bought an Echo, and now Alexa is basically a member of the family. What had once been magical had suddenly become a chore.
You know how your heart sinks when you go to a shop and accidentally spend slightly more than £30, because it means you have to forego contactless payment in favour of manually entering your pin number with your fat cow hands like some sort of gormless circus monkey? That’s how it felt when I returned the Echo and reverted to digging out my phone, opening an app, typing some words, scrolling through choices and pressing play on my dumb anachronism of a Sonos. With the Echo, I could listen to any song ever recorded simply by saying its name aloud, like Noel Edmonds kissing a wish into the universe.
#Amazon has the best voice recognition software software#
I hate my Sonos player because last year I was given an Amazon Echo to review – complete with its voice recognition software Alexa – which instantly relegated my Sonos to the junkpile.
0 kommentar(er)
