The Interface of Things: A Universal Remote for Your Life

Ford’s Sync. Ford

When was the last time you tried to use the speech recognition feature on your phone or in your car? Maybe it was to ask your GPS program for directions, to place a call without taking your eyes off of the road or to check on traffic ahead.

Did it work? If your experience is like mine, you probably had marginal success. For example: my GPS system only hears me correctly about 50 percent of the time and struggles with street or town names. Admittedly, my Boston accent, coupled with the noisy environment of my car, doesn’t make things easier. Having been forced to pull over on several occasions to manually input my destination, I now make it a point to enter the location into my GPS before I hit the road.

According to a recent study by AAA on the potential safety risks of hands-free systems for vehicles, a detour in your morning commute could be the least of your concerns. The report found that voice-command systems can cause distracted driving, even if a driver’s eyes are on the road and both hands are on the wheel. This recent phenomenon, called “inattention blindness,” is as dangerous as manual texting while driving.

Common barriers like these have marginalized the value of voice recognition technology in smart devices, relegating its primary purpose to entertainment and infotainment status. Look no further than the Google Now commercial where a child asks if dogs can dream, or the new Amazon Echo interactive speaker, which serves as a nifty way to dictate notes or ask about the weather (and more importantly, to add things to your Amazon shopping list.) When it comes to the important things, most people opt for solutions that are sure to work every time.

Consumer research backs this up, too: according to a recent study by Affinnova, 41 percent of Americans feel strongly that the smart products they’ve seen or heard about are gimmicky. More than half say they won’t upgrade to a smart product until the maker can prove it has value beyond novelty.

For smart devices to take off, we need to focus on the interface. This means speech recognition that works regardless of background noise, accents or barking dogs and natural language understanding capabilities that understand not just what’s being said or typed, but the intent behind it. Because whether via speech, text or touch, the interface is the critical link that can turn a novelty into a must-have.

Here’s four key reasons to master the “Interface of Things”:

1. Interacting with the Internet of Things: The Internet of Things (IoT) holds the promise to transform the way we live by creating vehicles, appliances, devices and services that communicate naturally and share information to anticipate needs and next steps. But what good is the Internet of Things if we can’t interface with it? Whether powered by speech, touch or text, the true power of the much-hyped IoT will never be realized unless we can interact with it as naturally as one another.


2. Simplifying the Connected Life: As we transition from living in a connected world to living a connected lifestyle, the need to interface with ease will be of paramount importance. Remember when the universal remote replaced the individual remotes needed for the TV, cable box, and VCR? What if you could get rid of the remote control entirely and just tell your TV to find your show? The Interface of Things – powered by our voice – will be the universal remote for the hundreds, if not thousands, of connected devices we’ll encounter every day.


3. Being There When it Really Matters: A mix-up in speech recognition today can lead to frustration or embarrassment; have you ever inadvertently called your boss when you were trying to reach your best friend? But when it comes to mission critical tasks like getting help when you’re stranded on the side of the road, or turning off your home alarm so your son can get in after school, you need the interface to work. And when it works, consumers will begin to adopt smart devices as tools that improve their way of life.


4. Realizing the Promise of Star Trek Tech: It’s hard to talk about the future without looking back at what science fiction has offered over the last 50 years. From a medical tricorder to 3-D printing, many of the impossible innovations from Star Trek are now becoming a reality. Speech recognition technology is no different, and the Interface of Things will allow anyone to step into their home, office or automobile and make a request with the confidence of a Star Fleet captain.

Although still somewhat marginalized as a toy for entertainment, developers, enterprises and other visionaries are clamoring for speech recognition technology that is reliable enough to power devices and applications that operate in “can’t fail” situations.

Solutions that will lead the way will incorporate multiple recognition methods so that when difficulties in understanding are encountered, the device has a backup to ensure accuracy of intent. They will also be multimodal, incorporating not only verbal inputs, but gestures and text input as well. And finally, solutions need to be personalized and maintain context to remove frustration and eliminate unnecessary, distracting steps. The good news is this level of reliability – the Interface of Things – is not as far off in the future as many people may think.

What’s holding speech recognition back? Is it the technology, the lack of providers, or something else? How would you use the Interface of Things if it was available today?

Mike Iacobucci is President and CEO of Interactions Corporation.