If you own an Apple product -or even if you don’t-, you must be familiar with Apple’s software virtual assistant, Siri, who replies to voice commands. You might also be familiar with the fact that communicating with Siri can sometimes be annoying, due to the fact that it often doesn’t understand your commands and the responses you get are deficient.
This is exactly what the founders of a small British company, Vocal IQ, decided they needed to solve. What they did was to develop a software which supports voice assistants, such as Siri, Google Now and Cortana, by helping them learn from past conversations and better understand the user’s commands. The Vocal IQ technology aims to enable fluent, coherent conversations between humans and computers, something that might resemble the technology imagined in the movies Her and Iron Man.
Vocal recognition and machine learning technologies like the ones developed by Vocal IQ have great potential in being incorporated not only into smartphones, but also into smartwatches and automobiles. In fact, the company is already collaborating with General Motors on the development of a smart software for drivers, which will enable them to vocally command the wipers to start, the radio to go louder, the air conditioning system to shut down and so on. The new software will be designed to ensure the driver’s safety, who will no longer need to take his/her eyes off the road.
Given the ingenuity of the Vocal IQ software, Apple decided to buy the start-up and benefit from their technology. This is very good news for Apple users, because their experience with Siri might improve significantly in the near future. Until now, a conversation with Siri was based on interaction between pre-established replies, which gave it a limited number of reactions to commands. However, thanks to Vocal IQ, we might soon be witnessing a great leap in the evolution of technology, which will impact not only Apple users, but all of us.
Vocal IQ began as a project of The University of Cambridge and is using deep learning techniques in order to improve the communication between computers and humans, by insisting on the context of the given commands. The Company’s CEO is Blaise Thomson, a South-African mathematician, while the chairman is Steve Young, an IT professor. The start-up managed to raise 750.000 £ in a seed round of funding led by Amadeus Capital Partners.
Sursa foto: Artificial intelligence
