If you are too busy to make that call to book your salon or restaurant, Google’s new updated virtual assistant just may be able to help out. This sophisticated technology can make complicated calls, complete with hesitated, ‘mmhmms’ and ‘errs’.
Google made the announcement at Google I/O, which is a yearly event held since 2008 to share new tools and strategies with creators of products that work with Google software and hardware.
Looking into the history of voice recognition actually takes us back to 1952, when Bell Laboratories created Audrey, who was able to understand digits, but only from one voice. In 1962, IBM came out with Shoebox, which apart from understanding the digits from 0 through 9, could decipher 16 spoken words.
In the 1970s, Carnegie Mellon University created the Harpy speech-understanding system. With the vocabulary of an average three-year old, Harpy could understand around 1,011 words. It was also designed with a better search approach, which led to looking at searches by including an entire sentence rather than just a word, in other words, the importance of context.