Visions & opinions news

Automation technologies like natural language interaction and IVR have revolutionized the way customers interact with the customer service function.

Hi house, how are you doing? We are seeing a growing number of initiatives that aim to promote home automation using natural language voice technology rather than buttons or keyboards as the user interface.

I just read Nick Bilton’s blog post in Bits “Disruptions: TV Makers Ignore Apps at Their Own Peril”.  I know it’s now a couple of months since it was published but hey, you can’t catch every blog post every time and what he’s saying still remains spot-on.

The blogosphere is awash with views on Apple’s Siri. Some of it effusive with its praise, some reveling in its supposed shortcomings — see this post from the New York Times Bits blog for example. One thing for sure, you could be forgiven for thinking that Apple’s natural language technology that powers Siri was the only game in town.

Disruptive technology developers from the Nordics have done it again; this time it is the Finnish based company Rovio who, with their success app “Angry Birds”, has teamed up with Samsung to launch the game on Smart-TV. Without remote control or touch interface you will be able to catapult birds and destroy the vicious green pigs just by using gestures. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could talk to the birds as well?

These days we can control the key functions of a smartphone, TV or even automobile by voice. Clearly, voice control is a cool feature that will soon be commonplace on a broad range of consumer devices. For disabled people, however, assistive technologies like voice control are not just cool but an essential way to help make their lives better.

The field of computational linguistics has a long list of unsolved problems that have been challenging linguists all around the world for decades now. Disciplines like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Translation (MT), as well as speech technologies like Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-To-Speech (TTS), despite having proved successful in the past few years, still lack the naturalness that is inherent to human communication.

Despite the advance of Twitter and Facebook, email is still the “killer” electronic communications medium particularly at work, where it long ago replaced the telephone as the preferred way for communicating between colleagues. But not all of the billions of emails handled each day by office workers are strictly work-related. According to a recent study, about 15% of the emails sent by corporate users contain information about a person or persons not among the recipients. In other words, they contain gossip.

Animated characters are an excellent option to engage employees with eLearning initiatives without spending a considerable amount of money.

Ever since supermarkets introduced shopping online there has been the promise of a fridge capable of automatically restocking itself. Why is it then that over a decade since LG introduced the first internet fridge we haven’t got much further, and how can Natural Language Interaction (NLI) technology solve the problem?