Voice technology isn’t a Trend, but a new IT paradigm shift

A new development has already been revealed, although we were previously cynical about voice technology, the statistics are quite eloquent. According to the Canalys, the worldwide smart speaker market grew 187% in Q2 2018, with shipments reaching 16.8 million units. Thus a new eon of voice-enabled devices can be considered open, and the previous trend of voice technology implementation can already be recognized as a major shift recently occurred in the digital world.

For the research, I selected 6 main data points which are : Phonograph, Audrey, Harpy, Julie Doll, Dragon Dictate and Siri. These are the main milestones in the development process of Speech Recognition. By using web page as a medium, I tried to tell a story on evolution of voice technology. The narrative presented timeline of how these events have been through time. The suitable and appropriate form that could present the information on voice technology was through voice commands. We have personified each Device, and they give their introduction in their own unique way. The timeline follows the narrative in parallel. The narrative also explains how its presence has generated technological, cultural and other social impacts.

Additionally, when it came to the creation of HARPY, which could understand 3000 words, DARPA played a big role. HARPY was created at Carnegie Mellon University and was funded by DARPA. It wanted to make changes in their military programs and wanted to develop it further which was possible with Voice Technology only. Places like Bell Labs and Carnegie Mellon University is responsible for about 50–60% of how much has been developed in Voice Technology, which led to the creation of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa.

After mapping of these data points, I realised how one innovation gives birth to another. The inventions of a technology are mostly interconnected. By historifying a technology, one gets a different perspective to look at the discovery. It also gives different insights at the stories of the developers and designers. It justifies the actions- why and what they thought.

Hence I feel, for the further new innovations in technology, it is extremely important to study the history of it.

From the year 1877, United States of America started making their mark on voice technology industry.Till the date, the country has been a number one contributor to speech recognition technology. The country has funded in almost all the voice based innovations. Speech Recognition technology has evolved a lot over the years. From large sized devices to palm sized devices, from just understanding hardly few words to completely analyse complex sentences and responding to the queries, voice technology has come a long way. It’s just the start, it definitely has much more scope in the future.