Speech is quickly becoming the next mainstream interface mode.
This has of course long been the norm for smartphones and special devices and all common devices and operating systems have voice recognition. However, we are starting to see a shift in the prevalence of this feature.
The benefits of communicating with your voice instead of your fingers are obvious – you can say something much faster than you type.
About five years ago in 2016th, Stanford University researchers tested how quickly and accurately search queries can be performed using voice and compared these results with what was typed. The researchers found that verbally typing the search query in English was three times faster than typing in English, and speaking in Mandarin Chinese was 2.8 times faster than using a keyboard. The error rates when using speech were also lower.
This Stanford research was done on smartphones and was separate from other apps or work. When you bring today’s speech technology to the PC, the possibilities for integration and useful tasks grow dramatically.
At Lenovo, language is an important part of our strategy for smarter devices. We want devices (PCs, smartphones, smart home devices, and tablets) to act as hubs to help users manage their home and work lives, wherever that may be.
Lenovo has been working with Amazon since 2017 to bring voice AI functionality to PCs with Alexa. In May, Lenovo announced the Alexa Show Mode exclusively for selected Lenovo Yoga, IdeaPad and ThinkPad PCs with Windows 10, and further models are planned. Show Mode automatically turns your Lenovo PC into a smart display so you can ask Alexa to show you trending news, listen to music, or set a timer from across the room.
This is just one example of how we’ve worked with partners to advance voice technology, but we actually have a success story of our own, which can be seen in Lenovo Voice, which we launched on Lenovo Vantage. Our focus has always been on the unique use cases of Lenovo and our devices, and from there on working with a number of key players in the broader language ecosystem.
By working with Amazon, we can focus on new technologies we’re good at, such as on-device AI, and bring that technology together with Amazon’s expertise in speech recognition to create the best of both worlds.
Another advantage is that Alexa is known to millions of users of Alexa-enabled devices worldwide.
However, when you’re on PCs, things change from using other Alexa-enabled devices. First of all, it is much more complex to implement an Alexa Show Mode experience on PCs. The operating environment was originally designed long before Voice existed.
That’s why we partnered with Amazon to address some of these challenges. Security is an example: when your laptop lid is closed, your device is locked and nothing happens without the correct password, personal face, or other biometric data to unlock it. How does voice restart a PC when it is idle, and how does it recognize your voice when it is asleep?
And power usage needs to be managed in a new way: if your laptop is constantly powering voice recognition software, what happens to battery management? We work with our partners to develop energy-saving devices that can wake up by voice.
Cool innovations like pronunciation support, speech recognition and translation, all powered by intelligent AI, are helping people communicate more easily in virtual meetings. This consists of two parts – speech recognition and the AI backend.
This is how we will work with devices in the future – and how they respond. If you surf, surf or want to accomplish more complex things, you will use the language more often. The ability to tell a word to go bold in a presentation, or to instruct a spreadsheet to put a number in a specific cell, or to sum a column of numbers, are actions that would be surprisingly simple, very effective, and fairly intuitive.
For companies, the use cases differ from the smart home. I don’t see people yelling at their PCs in their office cubicles. It’s just not a sweet spot use case for voice. But again, when you talk about remote and hybrid work, the home-work relationship for using speech changes as we all spend time calling and interacting outside of the office.
I have spoken to many companies that have only slowly followed the path of language use – until COVID.
As with everything else, this is about adoption and behavior change. In a previous article, I talked about connecting all of my devices at home and how silly I felt asking my network to do things with voice. It just didn’t feel natural at first.
The same applies to the Alexa show mode. I used a number of prototypes of our new PCs with Alexa Show Mode and initially felt uncomfortable asking Alexa to play 80s hits (and not because of the music).
And then, after a week, I felt more comfortable with Alexa on my PC remotely or while reading a report. I was able to multitask between working and changing the music I was listening to, all with the power of my voice.
Alexa’s versatility at home in show mode or on the go has changed the way I have used my PC.
It is important for Lenovo to provide voice to Lenovo PCs as we add value to the device for users, in their homes, and in the way they use their PCs. We have a dedicated team working on language within Lenovo, learning and developing language interfaces, technology software and applications. It is one of the core technologies that we are constantly researching.
The future generations of PC operating systems and the apps that run on them will likely be very different from what we know today. In the years to come, we may laugh at how we use equipment today, but moving into that future will require early steps on what is sometimes a technically difficult path. One of those steps involves the voice, and as we strive to be a more productive and collaborative society, the voice is always central.
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