[Nfbf-l] Google is preparing for screenless computers. This couldbe interesting from an accessibility perspective

Fri Aug 16 00:50:03 UTC 2013

That is mind-blowing!  My phone responds to voice commands, if I tell it to 
call a contact stored in its memory, which is by itself pretty incredible, 
but this is almost the stuff of science fiction.

Mark Tardif
Nuclear arms will not hold you.
-----Original Message----- 
From: Alan Dicey
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2013 6:22 PM
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject: [Nfbf-l] Google is preparing for screenless computers. This couldbe 
interesting from an accessibility perspective

Dear Friends,
I like the way they are comparing voice interaction with operating system
etc. to old-school command line interface
And, I am forwarding this since, like Peter Meijer says, this could have
quite an effect with regards to non-visual interaction with mainstream
devices,  etc.
With Best Regards,
God Bless,
Alan
Plantation, Florida
----- Original Message ----- 
Hi All,

For your information. Appended is today's article in Quartz.
This could be interesting from an accessibility perspective
as well.
Best wishes,
Peter Meijer
Seeing with Sound - The vOICe
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvoice.htm

Google is preparing for screenless computers.
By Christopher Mims.
The spread of computing to every corner of our physical world doesn't just
mean a proliferation of screens large and small-it also means we'll soon
come to rely on mobile computers with no screens at all. "It's now so
inexpensive to have a powerful computing device in my car or lapel, that if
you think about form factors, they won't all have keyboards or screens,"
says Scott Huffman, head  of the Conversation Search group at Google.

Google is already moving rapidly to enable voice commands in all of its
products. On mobile phones, Google Now for Android and Google's search app
on the iPhone allow users to search the web via voice, or carry out other
basic functions like sending emails. Similarly, Google Glass would be almost
unusable without voice interaction. At Google's conference for developers,
it unveiled voice control for its Chrome web browser. And Motorola's new
Moto X phone  has a specialized microchip that allows the phone to listen at
all times, even when it's asleep, for the magic word that begins every voice
conversation with a Google product: "OK."

There's nothing new about voice interaction with computers per se. What's
different about Google's work on the technology is that the company wants to
make it as fluid and easy as keyboards and touch screens are now. That's a
challenge big enough that, thus far, it has kept voice-based interfaces from
going mainstream in our personal computing devices. And in cases when they
are
in use, such as interactive voice response systems designed to handle
customer
service calls, they can be frustrating.

Interacting with a computer like it's a friend

"What we're really trying to do is enable a new kind of interaction with
Google
where it's more like how you interact with a normal person," says Huffman.
To
illustrate, he picks up his smartphone and says "How far is it from here to
Hearst Castle?"

Normally, getting an answer to such a seemingly simple question would
require
googling "Hearst Castle," clicking on a map, and typing in your own address.
But
Huffman's phone gets the answer right on the first try-a neat illustration
of
how voice commands can save time and effort. In a way, it's part of the
natural
progression of convenience in computer interfaces: 10 years ago writing an
email
required walking over to a computer, five years ago we could whip out our
phones, and in the near future we'll simply start talking.

Leveraging what Google already knows about reality

To achieve this kind of apparent simplicity, the Conversation Search group
has
to muster everything that Google already knows about the real world. That's
because, as anyone who has discovered that half the battle of learning a
foreign
language is absorbing the culture in which it's embedded, the meaning behind
language is always dependent on context.

"One thing that really helps us is the base of all the core relevance and
ranking work that the Google search engine is famous for," says Huffman.
Part of
that "relevance" is the Google Knowledge Graph, a database of people, places
and
things that allows Google to know, for example, that when you ask it for
"Cruise
movies" you are probably asking for the films of Tom Cruise, rather than
"crews
movies" or any of a number of other possibilities.

Beating humans at understanding meaning

This context doesn't just make Google's voice interfaces usable-some day, it
could make them even better than humans. "Today, automatic speech
recognition is
not as good as people, but our ambition is, we should be able to be better
than
people," says Huffman. In order to achieve that, Google will leverage the
intimate knowledge it has of its users.

"In some sense Google has a lot of context that [a human transcriptionist]
doesn't have," says Huffman. "We know where you are based on your phone's
location and there is some context around what you've been talking about
lately.
Therefore that should help us understand what kinds of things you might be
saying."

Computers that talk back

The future of Google's voice interfaces isn't just accurate interpretation
of
commands, but real interaction-hence the "conversation" part of Huffman's
Conversation Search group. One trick Google's voice interface can already do
is
understand pronouns like he, she and it. "You can ask yourself why in
language
do things like pronouns exist-well, they exist because it lets us
communicate
faster than we do without them," says Huffman.

To demonstrate, Huffman follows up his question about how far it is to
Hearst
Castle with the sentence "give me directions," which doesn't even include
the
pronoun "it," but his phone begins rattling off directions in its tinny
computerized voice, anyway.

All of this is, of course, a demonstration laid out in advance for my
benefit.
And like any other nascent technology it doesn't always work perfectly. At
other
points in Huffman's demo, his smartphone fails to understand the pronouns 
he's
using. One reason for that, he notes, is that Google's voice interface
"forgets"
the subject of any conversation with it after a certain amount of time. Just
as
in natural conversation, it has a limited attention span.

In conversation, a human being who has forgotten the referent for a pronoun
like
"it" might ask his or her companion what he or she is talking about. 
Google's
conversation search can't do that yet, but his team is working on it, says
Huffman. Already, Google's regular search results perform a version of this
"can
you clarify?" task by suggesting search terms and providing other
disambiguating
links at the top of search results. Eventually, Google's voice search will
do
the same: "Did you mean the movies of Tom Cruise." or, given your search
history
"were you referring to the movies of Penelope Cruz?"

Fundamentally re-thinking the nature of computer interfaces

At this point, voice commands are a little-used feature of most people's
everyday interactions with computers, if we're using them at all. Between
the
present and a future in which we are reliably interacting with computers by
voice alone, there are a number of challenges, some of them fundamental to
what
we think of as a computer interface.

One challenge to voice control is simply reliability and error correction.
For
example, as Google Glass transcribes your words for an email, text or social
media update, you can actually see the ghostly words hovering in your field
of
view, but how does an interface that relies solely on our ears accomplish
the
same? Does it read our messages back to us?

Another issue is that current visual computer interfaces limit our options
in
ways that can make them easier to use. For example, in graphical user
interfaces
we can find out what a program can do by clicking on all of its buttons and
looking under its menus. But commanding a computer by voice is more like the
old
model of interaction with a computer-the command line. It's a potentially
powerful interface-Huffman imagines a future in which we might even
communicate
with our computers via a verbal short-hand-but it would require that humans
learn a whole new way to control computers, and learn anew the capabilities
of all the software that might be used in this way.

This restaurant recommendation brought to you by vast, distributed neural
networks
Ultimately, none of these issues may prove as insurmountable as the ones
that Google has already overcome by virtue of its enormous search database,
knowledge
of the real world, cloud computing infrastructure and army of Ph.D.s who
work on
voice recognition and natural language processing. Currently, the everyday
magic
of understanding voice commands is carried out almost entirely in the cloud,
because processing human speech is difficult enough that even a
sophisticated
smartphone doesn't have the processing power to do it at a high enough level
of
reliability.

That means voice commands issued to Google's hardware and software are
recorded,
shot into the cloud and parsed into next steps, rather than being handled by
the
device itself. "For speech recognition, it's a very data intensive thing,"
says
Huffman. "We use giant neural network things that are spread across many
servers." Which means that when we talk to our phones, there really is
someone
listening to our every command-just not an intelligence we'd recognize as
human.

Source URL:
http://qz.com/115304/google-is-preparing-for-screenless-computers/

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