/pcq/media/agency_attachments/L8pkS8gpnodJThOdAfv1.jpg)
Follow Us
New Update
The mobile phone industry was revoluti onized by the advent of SMS services, the most widely used data applicati on in the world, with over 3.7 billion acti ve users. Fingers were never stagnant aft er that, as typing became akin to using the phone. This trend was taken forward to smartphones and typing spread to other domains of use. This is soon going to make way for another development where touching and typing will be replaced forever by voice commands.
This is because of Speech Recogniti on (SR) technology, also known as automati c speech recogniti on or ASR, which translates spoken words into text.
SIRI is the fi rst commercial applicati on of this technology which is available as an app on Apple iStore. It is basically an off shoot of the DARPA-funded CALO project developed in SRI Internati onal Arti fi cial Intelligence Center.
What can SIRI do for you?
It can read your messages loudly to you. It provides directi ons, and if you ask for factual stuff , it opens and search the web browser to give you answers. It can take your commands for setti ng alarms, reminders, ti mers, calendar
events. It also uses GPS functi onality to fi nd about places or joints that can serve your needs. SIRI is integrated with iOS and off ers conversati onal interacti on with multi ple applicati ons, including reminders, weather, stocks, messaging, email, calendar, contacts, notes, music, clocks, web search, and maps. It supports English, German, French, and Japanese. It is believed that SIRI’s speech recogniti on engine is developed by Nuance Communicati ons, a speech technology company, even though Apple and Nuance are mum about it.
AISHA is the Indian SIRI
Arti fi cial Intelligence Speech Handset Assistant (AISHA) introduced by Micromax in Micromax A50 smartphone, is a voice recogniti on tool for making your searches easier and more exciti ng. From fi nding facts on search engines to making calls and fi nding locati ons through GPS, AISHA can do all, just like SIRI. Apart from that, it can send messages, search for contacts through in-built speech recogniti on apps. It is obvious that AISHA is just another voice recogniti on tool but for an Indian scenario. It provides up to date news on the latest events with features powered by Twitt er and Bing. Micromax has made back-end ti e ups with Indian websites like ti mesjobs.com, simplymarry.com, etc to provide specifi c services relevant to an Indian customer.
Similar to SIRI, it provides movie reviews, song lyrics, recipe search through its backend ti e-ups. SIRI has more service related ti e-ups with websites like Open Table, Gaylot, BooRah, etc for booking seats in restaurants; to know about concerts it has ti e-ups with Eventf ul, Stub Hub and Live Kick; for movie related service they have combined Movie Tickets, Rott en Tomatoes, New York Times etc. For web search they have ti e ups with Bing and Google. The limitati on, despite so many services, is that they are all based in USA and so are obsolete for an India based user. SIRI faces another issue in India, which is of its proclivity for American accent and is usually confused with other English accents. AISHA has no such issues and read almost 75% of voice commands accurately.
SIRI was launched fi rst as an applicati on available on Apple’s App Store in USA. Aft er it was included as an iPhone 4S feature, Apple removed SIRI app from the App Store. The app which worked on all iPhone units was now available only on iPhone 4S, which costs somewhere around 40k. Whereas, AISHA is available with Micromax Ninja A50 smartphone, priced at only 5k.