The changing face of the IT industry
Talking is just so much faster than typing and reading e-mails, and especially so when working in the same office. But what if your conversational partner is in a distant time zone? Or worse: you obtain information verbally, and then have to write it down to save the information for later recall—double the amount of work. Ok, there are virtual assistants like Siri and speech recognition software like Dragon Dictate, but they don’t change the general picture. Emerging technology from Google may be about to change things.
Change is coming that will enable speech, however. Google recently bought a ton of patents concerning voice recognition and speech interfacing for search engines. The search giant says they want to enable people to use their services in as natural a way as possible. So users should be able to just dictate a question and let Google answer it verbally, too.
However, HarQen’s Kelly Fitzsimmons, whose company focuses on speech applications, wants to go another step. She believes that voice still has its own web 2.0 before it. At the moment, voice can maximally be used to give commands to machines, and that is still a niche market. She sees huge potential for speech as an information source. E-mails take longer to type than just saying what you have to say. When technology permits, we could even have conversations overseas without bothering with the time differences. That is technically possible today, but the convenient thing about e-mail is that information is searchable and easily extractable. We don’t have that for recorded voice files at the moment.
As soon as this changes, however—and it will happen soon—we will experience a change in the way we use the internet and telecommunication in general, privately and in business. But in order to make conversations searchable and for information from them to be extractable, we would have to have our conversations recorded. Are we willing to sell privacy to gain productivity? Again? Only the technology’s further development will show where users draw the line.
If you are struggling to keep up with emerging technology and need help to stay on top of it, then give the team at Green Cloud Computers a call. We are leading experts in PC Maintenance, and PC Repairs servicing Ashbourne, Ratoath, Meath and surrounding counties.
