Artificial intelligence based voice shopping

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Artificial intelligence based voice shopping.

Voice activated and voice recognition software has moved on at a remarkable speed. I remember my first introduction to this technology when I used a product called, ‘Dragon NaturallySpeaking’. Back then it consisted of a headset, microphone, training CD and software.  It was designed to be used with a word processor – Wordperfect if I recall correctly.

Speak to me

The idea was that you dictated directly to your computer (your wordprocessor) using the microphone and headset. As you can imagine it took time and practice to train your system to recognise your voice. It was okay – I struggled to get on with but it was early days I guess. That was back in the early 1990’s. Now after many years of development we still have Dragon NaturallySpeaking with us and going strong too!

Voice control

We now have much more sophisticated voice command systems for our pleasure with artificial intelligence lurking behind the scenes. Apple have Siri, Amazon have Alexa, Microsoft have Cortana and Google have, well…Google. Their names are irrelevant really – what isn’t is that there has been a revolution in speech recognition and artificial intelligence since the arrival of Dragon Speak in the 90’s. It depends which side of the A.I. fence you sit on. I think for voice control applications such as shopping it has a useful place but I worry about A.I. involvement in areas such as weapons for example. But that’s another subject for another day. I am also unsure about the idea of devices always in ‘listening mode’ in our homes. This raises privacy concerns.

Voice apps

With voice controlled apps we can simply pick up our mobile phone and bark instructions at it. Using just our voice we can carryout online searches, pick a movie to watch, select a radio station to listen to, get directions, find somewhere to eat and much much more. And now using this technology we can… shop!

Amazon dominate online retail and now use their voice technology fronted by Alexa (meaning ‘defender of man’) to help us shop online.  Presumably this is seen by the business world as an explosive area to further boost profits and so corporate giants Google and Walmart have joined forces to enter the voice shopping market.

‘Message to Computer … please send me a new computer!’ – Thanks.

Is it goodbye TV remote control as we know it?

More on this post to follow…

 

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