We have this system - Microsoft Speech Server - that is able to make (or receive) phone calls. Usually we expect that the other end of the line is going to be a person answering our call - or that the caller is a person. Sometimes though when an outbound call is made it isn't actually a person that has answered. This is a problem I've been working on lately, but that aside it got me thinking... when it is a computer that answered - such as a voice mail system, we effectively have two computers talking to each other using human (synthesized) speech. Kind of a weird protocol for two computers to use to talk to each other huh! I wonder if that will actually become more common one day (e.g. 20-30 years out?) - for the lingua franca for computers to communicate with each other to become speech. In that future possible world computers wouldn't actually distinguish between whether they were communicating with a person or a computer. I guess by then computers (or the software driving them) would be sophisticated enough in many cases that even we wouldn't be able to tell whether we were communicating with a human or a computer if we weren't in the physical presence of the other party. I believe that solutions for the Turing test will become increasingly common and there will be a sort of arms race for people to think up ever more sophistocated forms of the Turing test and more sophiticated solutions to it.
The flaw in my imagining here though is that speech is such an inefficient and error prone communication mechanism. It is full of ambiguity, and contextual sensitivity. People have to go back and forth to confirm that what they thought they heard was what was intended for example. Or they fail to confirm and the mistake is only discovered later down the line. Like when the passenger gets off the plane in Melbourne, Florida, rather than Melbourne, Australia! That's why schemas are so important in the world of compter information exchange - to remove ambiguity and inconsistencies. Maybe we need to schematize human speech so we can communicate as efficiently as computers? Of course it would then be culture neutal also so we could understand each other around the world. No I don't seriously think that will ever happen - so much of our communication is tied to our common cultural experiences.
OK, enough of my random rambling for now. (Hmmm, how long before computers will be able to post original random rambling blogs?) Hey did you wonder if maybe this was authored by a computer? Huh?
