What it is: Siri is Apple’s natural language, voice recognition system that’s about to get better with the acquisition of a British company called VocalIQ.
In the old days, natural language, voice recognition systems were clumsy. First, you had to train them to recognize your voice. Second, you had to put up with inaccurate recognition because your voice changes during the day, when you’re sick, tired, or excited.
So when Apple introduced Siri, it was a revolutionary concept. Not only could you give natural language commands to Siri, you didn’t have to waste time training it to recognize your voice. Even better, Siri can recognize multiple languages as well.
However, Siri is still fairly limited and starting to fall behind rivals like Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Now. That’s why Apple recently acquired a British company called VocalIQ. Unlike Siri, VocalIQ does more than just understand the currently spoken command; VocalIQ also understands the context of the spoken command.
If you ask VocalIQ about Mexican restaurants within 10 miles and next ask about steak houses, VocalIQ is smart enough to figure out from the context that you probably also want to find steak houses within 10 miles of your current location.
As impressive as Siri and other natural language assistants might be, they have short-term memory, much like holding a conversation with Dory, the forgetful fish from “Finding Nemo.” VocalIQ simply makes a natural language assistant able to understand more unspoken but implied meaning. That translates into less cumbersome talking and more natural conversation. The ultimate goal of VocalIQ is to allow you to control a device with your voice alone without ever forcing you to look at a screen.
That becomes extremely important for CarPlay, Apple’s car entertainment system. Taking your eyes off the road for even a second while driving can be dangerous, so a virtual assistant like VocalIQ can help you control your car’s entertainment system without making you look at the screen.
Beyond CarPlay, VocalIQ may also be used to turn Siri into an intelligent home assistant much like Amazon’s Echo. This would allow you to give vocal commands to a home device to control temperature, lighting, or appliances.
Since Apple recently acquired VocalIQ, don’t expect the technology to make its way into Apple products right away. Most likely, VocalIQ will make Siri smarter and more conversational by next year. For the immediate future, expect Apple to open up the application programming interface (API) to allow developers to allow Siri to control their apps. This will make Siri more useful and more commonplace. As more people get comfortable using voice commands to control an app, using voice commands will become as common as using a mouse and a keyboard.
Voice commands aren’t going to replace a keyboard or mouse any more than the mouse replaced the keyboard. Voice commands will simply be another option for interacting with a computer just like a touch screen or trackpad.
Voice controlled computers are part of the future. They’re going to get smarter over time until today’s intelligent assistants will look absurdly primitive in comparison. The future of having a conversation with a computer is going to get here soon. It might not come as fast as you might think, but it’s going to come faster than you might expect.