March 09, 2004
Red Sox Technologies
My essay on technologies that perennially disappoint.
- Micropayments
- E-books
- Speech Recognition
- Video Conferencing
- Social Networking Software
- Virtual Classrooms
...The engineers, tinkerers, and inventors who are still working on Red Sox technologies all labor under the illusion that all that is needed is a better solution. However, I think that you will find that if you examine Red Sox technologies closely enough, you will see that in each case they address the wrong problem.
Speech recognition is going mainstream, just not the way it was portrayed in the movie 2001. (Dave, open the pod bay doors.) Many customer support phone conversations are now intermediated with speech recognition, as are many 411 calls.
All the problems with synthetic human conversation Kling mentioned are real. So the solution is not to have a conversation, but rather a deliberately shortened query and response.
Posted by Philipw on March 9, 2004 09:53 AM | Permalink to Comment
Speech recognition is going mainstream, just not the way it was portrayed in the movie 2001. (Dave, open the pod bay doors.) Many customer support phone conversations are now intermediated with speech recognition, as are many 411 calls.
All the problems with synthetic human conversation Kling mentioned are real. So the solution is not to have a conversation, but rather a deliberately shortened query and response.
Posted by Philipw on March 9, 2004 09:53 AM | Permalink to Comment