Alexa and Siri, listen up! Teaching machines to really hear us
Per Sederberg, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia, offers a fun experiment you can perform at home. Take out your smartphone and speak the word "octopus" as slowly as you can using a voice assistant, such the one for Google's search engine. It will be difficult for your gadget to repeat what you just stated. It can offer you a meaningless response or something resembling anything but still odd, like "toe pus." Gross! The fact is, according to Sederberg, that existing artificial intelligence is still a little deaf when it comes to receiving aural cues as humans and other animals do, despite all of the computer power devoted to the endeavor by tech giants like Google, Deep Mind, IBM, and Microsoft. For people who struggle with their speech, the results can be anything from amusing and somewhat aggravating to downright alienating. However, UVA joint research has made it feasible to transform current AI neural networks into technology that can actua...