I'm going hands free...

摘要

Last week, my editor issued a challenge: Could I file a story to him, from Boston to London, without actually typing anything? Speech recognition still has a few hurtles left climb, Says a BEER space a LW AN, at the University of California Los Angeles. Editor's note: Aviva filed the story according to the challenge, and apart from a few early glitches, it worked. The copy needed no special editing. Thanks to the influx of voice recognition tools released over the past few years, the task seemed doable. There's Siri, the friendly voice of Apple; Cortana, Microsoft's eager personal assistant; Google Now, with its famous start phrase "OK Google"; and a host of others, embedded in our televisions, cars and phones. Meanwhile, other companies seem anxious to get in the game: Facebook snapped up speech start-up Wit.ai in January and music app SoundHound released its own voice search tool earlier this month.