Computers are learning our language
Computers are learning our language, instead of forcing us to learn theirs is a great line from the James Temple piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today to explain what Natural User Interfaces are. I posted a third entry on our corporate blog last week talking about the role of voice and speech recognition in NUI’s and think the meme of NUI is only going to get louder over the next 6 months.
Microsoft I’m pleased to say is at the forefront of this with products like Surface, Kinect, Windows Phone, Ford Sync etc but we’re not alone in our pursuit of more natural ways to interact with technology. Nokia, Apple, Intel, Siri, Sony and many others are chasing this dream too. The success of this era will be marked by the things we don’t notice rather than the things we do – which should make for some interesting marketing and advertising and essentially you’re trying to sell something that is invisible. In many ways, you could say designers like Dieter Rams are for forefathers of NUI – he spent years designing products where function followed form and where less is very often more. Jonathan Ive at Apple has a similar philosophy and now we’re beginning to see it move beyond the hardware of Rams and Ive and in to software – or a combination of hardware and software like Kinect.
The field of machine learning is a crucial part of this NUI era and something I plan to cover in more detail on a soon to be announced new blog.
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to James’s second piece on Monday where he’ll cover how Google, Microsoft and others are training machines to understand human language, improving the quality of online search and expanding the notion of what it means.