The Fatal Story that Impacted Me
I am the founder of an emerging sound recognition business and you might be wondering what keeps me going through daily ambiguity and uncertainty.
Voice recognition is capable of recognizing millions combinations of words and utterances across multiple languages.
Over 136 million Americans enjoy the convenience of voice recognition in their smart phones and smart assistants.
Meanwhile, sound recognition can only detect and react to 500–600 sounds.
Firms such as RAIN, VoiceBot, and PullString demonstrate heavily inflating value of voice recognition since it allows market players create new channels of revenue.
The world’s a perfect place…voice assistant saves time, effort, energy to do basic tasks for millions. It can’t get better than that right?
What about…
Emergency situations?
This makes me ponder how voice assistants would be able to respond in emergency and natural disaster scenarios.
Maybe voice recognition could give you reinforcement during the situation guiding the user to safety.
Therefore…
Is sound recognition really necessary?
A story helped me answer that question.
An elderly Deaf couple came back home from a date, parked their car in the garage. They got into bed and went to sleep.
They never woke up.
The community didn’t confirm their death after a few days. Authorities concluded they accidentally left their car running in the garage.
They were breathing in fatal amounts of harmful fumes from the car exhaust all night.
What really caught my attention was the fact that the elderly couple was Deaf. They weren’t able to hear the car left running in the garage when they got out of the car. We can’t blame this on their inability to hear.
This is where sound recognition comes in the picture.
Voice recognition isn’t even qualified to save people’s lives.
In a way…this is my pet peeve when I go about meeting professionals and engineers that go all crazy over how people can order pizza by using Alexa saving them a few minutes of their precious time. *sarcasm*
They just don’t realize the deeper impact that sound recognition can offer to consumers.
Sometimes these conversations/reports/news coverage covering the craze of how voice technologies are impacting millions of lives make me think….they are looking through the wrong lens.
Makes me even more motivated to keep going and devise strategies that get sound recognition to the market.
Sound recognition will be able to save millions or even billions of lives by implementing cheap, affordable, and low-tech devices all over the world that allow people and machines capitalize the powers of sound data that can could help save lives.
Talking about peace of mind.
Many would think sound recognition doesn’t have much impact on the world as compared to voice recognition.
In my eyes, the value of a single piece of technology that could save 2 lives will always outweigh the perks of voice recognition.
Separate from being a Deaf person and not being able to use voice recognition since I can’t speak nor hear….
Voice recognition will never earn my respect until they start integrating sound recognition technologies into their platform so users and companies around the globe can create unlimited numbers of use cases that SAVE lives.
Change my mind…
*I leave many condolences to their loved ones and friends. 💙
