Will voice interfaces ever take off?

Voice as a primary user interface has shown flickers of promise but has never taken off. Today, with AI at hand, it is still failing to go mainstream

- VERNIKA AWAL

Approximately 300 years ago, an ancient Arabic folklore became popular globally. Thus came the likely example of perhaps the first-ever voice interface in the world—when the fictional character from Alibaba and the Forty Thieves said to a cave, “Open, Sesame!”

In three centuries, one would have imagined voice interfaces in machines to have become an established order. Countless futuristic science fiction and comic movies have shown the same—look no further beyond Iron Man and his trusted AI assistant, Jarvis. However, even in an era of Alexa, Siri and OK Google, and where generative artificial intelligence continues to make waves, voice assistants remain basic, erroneous, intermittent and stunted. Will voice interfaces never, ever take off?

A BRIEF HISTORY

Beyond fiction and folklore, the first instance of a machine that could listen to and understand (albeit an elementary version of) what humans said was Audrey— shortened from Automatic Digit Recognition. Created by researchers at Silicon Valley’s Bell Laboratories in 1952, Audrey could only understand digits—that too when spoken to by specific individuals. Still, Audrey was a roaring success, the first instance when humans could speak with machines. This becomes more impressive in a pre-semiconductor, pre-general purpose computer era.

In 1962, IBM introduced its experimental voice-generating machine, Shoebox, which could understand 16 English words. By 1976, a United States government-funded initiative gave birth to a new machine called Harpy at Carnegie Mellon University, which ballooned Shoebox’s 16-word understanding range to a then impressive 1,011 words.