How Voice Interaction Technology Will Transform Smart Home
In the film Iron Man, there is a scenario where the hero says that he wants to drink coffee after returning home, and then the coffee machine starts to make coffee for him. This is probably a prototype of smart home. However, with the breakthrough of voice interaction technology, do you believe you can in fact control your entire home, including a TV, a refrigerator, a light bulb, a door lock or a telephone just using your voice?
Actually, many IT giants have stepped into the smart home field by combining smart home products with voice interaction technology — Google have acquired NEST to compete in the smart home area, constantly improving the performance of GoogleNow; Apple’s HomeKit smart home furniture platform continues to strengthen the integration with Siri; Microsoft’s released voice assistant Cortana has helped Microsoft expanded it’s business to smart home area. Facebook’s founder Zuckerberg spent 100 hours in 2016 to complete the development of the AI “butler” Jarvis. Zuckerberg and his family can speak to make voice commands to the smart phone or computer to control the lighting, temperature, music and security equipments, or other electric appliances. Jarvis system can even learn the owner’s preference , new vocabulary and related concepts.
As the most natural way of human communication, voice has advantage in controlling devices that we use everyday. People are being lazy, voice interaction technology allows us to make command to our smart furnitures without walking to them and pushing any button. The spread and popularity of smart home can only be achieved with the development of voice interaction technology. The investments on voice interaction technology combined with smart devices in home also indicate the trend of applying voice interaction technology to change people’s habit of everyday activities at home.
Voice interaction technology consists of many sub-technologies. As it is not always very convenient to have smart phones or devices nearby to have your voice heard, far-distance voice interaction technology is rather crucial to let people be understand at whatever corner you make command at your home. Voice interaction also involves a very complex technology chain, including acoustic processing, speech recognition, semantic understanding and speech synthesis and other core technologies. Acoustic processing is a simulation of human ears, which is used to ensure that machines can hear the voice as clearly as we hear. Speech recognition is to translate the voice to text information. Semantic understanding is to analyze the meaning of the words. Speech synthesis is to make the voice as we do based on the text message that the machine want to express. Although these four technologies develop independently, they can’t be separated. With the help of other relevant technologies, the complete chain of voice interaction can be achieved.
There are hundreds of companies and institutions busy researching on the voice interaction technologies, as the smart home area is expected to be a trillion dollar market. Driven by the interests of money, the day when we are accustomed to say “turn on the heater and prepare me a cup of hot milk” while getting up in the morning might not be too far away.