Do You Want To Talk To Your Computer?

Thanks everyone who voted at


To be honest I was suprised because my opinion is just the reverse of this result. I strongly disagree that command and control will be ever usable. Dictation probably will, but definitely not command and control. I have a hobby - collecting complains about voice control. Here are few ones

As article in PCWorld says

If so, you'll love what Microsoft is offering: voice recognition over the air, in which your commands are processed by a server in the clouds and converted into action on your smartphone. Boy, let's burn up those minutes and data plans! And waaait for the slow, usually incorrect response. Android has a similar capability for search, and it's amazingly frustrating to use, not to mention inaccurate.

The one good thing about Microsoft's fantasy about voice-command interfaces: You'll be able to identify a Windows Phone 7 user easily. Just listen for the person pleading with the phone to do what he asked. Whie the rest of us are quietly computing and communicating, he'll be hard to miss.

Another post from CNET

One of the major reasons why speech recognition has not caught on or been seriously looked at in terms of major finances is because people, if given the option of accurate speech recognition too, would still not wanna go for the voice commands, but would rather just use touchscreen. This is because voicing out takes more energy off a person than smoothly running yer fingers on the screen in your hand. Intuitive touchscreens and cleaner interfaces are far better a tool to invest in than making people accustomed to say out words that computers need to understand, process and then implement. Its way easier for the user (in terms of energy used to say it out) to just press the button on touchscreen. There will be certain exceptions, but I'm talking on a mass consumer adoption assumption.

I strongly believe that when we want to communicate with computer, there are better ways than to give them voice commands. Yes, speech is a natural way of communication but it's a communication between people. When you communicate with machine you don't necessary need to speak to it, there are more efficient ways. Even if you are driving.

On the other side I think that analytics, speech mining and similar stuff do have a very shiny future. According to DMG consulting the growth of this market will be 42 percent in 2011. That's a true potential. Speech recognition should seemlessly plug into comunication between people and extract value from it. Being non-intrusive it doesn't break patterns but helps to create the information. That's why we invest so much into mining and not into command and control. That's also the reason I don't want to invest too much time in gnome-voice-control.