I normally don’t watch much television, but when I got home last night my family had gone out to dinner, so I grabbed a veggie burger and plopped down in front of the TV. I decided to watch Band of Brothers (I had read a positive review of it once.)
During a break I saw Apple’s Voice Control advertisement. It was pretty dull as far as commercials go, and it certainly wasn’t the first one to feature a voice recognition consumer product (more on that later…) However, there was something VERY SPECIAL about it. Apple was making a big promotion for speech recognition as a user interface in one of the most successful consumer products ever – the iPhone. Now Apple isn’t just any company – Apple is a company that ABSOLUTELY LEADS in revolutionizing the user experience. From the early days of the Mac/Lisa/II and all the technologies that they developed (or learned from Xerox Parc) for computers, Apple revolutionized the music player and smart phone markets using cap/resistive sensor-based touch screens and text-to-speech capabilities. And now with the the latest iPhone, Apple has finally legitimized the voice interface in a main stream consumer product. By the way, as mentioned in an earlier Blog, this is not Sensory’s recognition, but probably from Nuance, which has a good technology and excellent language coverage.
For so many years, I heard that “Steve doesn’t like speech recognition”, as Apple had very unrealistic demands for performance and accuracy–at least until now. It’s fantastic to see Apple not only implementing speech technologies ACROSS their product line, but also ADVERTISING it as a key feature.
So a trivia question: What was the first broadcast commercial for a speech recognition consumer product? I’m not exactly sure, but I think Tomy and Tiger may have used television ads for Sensory-based products in 1995. In 1996, Hasbro had a GREAT commercial for an educational robot named RADAR that talked to kids featuring Sensory’s first speech chip, the RSC-164. Around 1998, Uniden launched a WONDERFUL commercial during the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament. They hired Konishiki, one of the world’s largest and most famous Sumo Wrestlers at the time, to rip apart phone books with his bare hands, then order a pizza by speaking to his Uniden Voice Dial phone (powered by a Sensory RSC-264 chip!) That was definitely the BEST speech recognition commercial ever!