The tough problems of simplicity
A lot of commentaries on Bill Gates' keynote speech at CES yesterday quoted his closing statement on Microsoft's increasing investment in "the toughest problems", such as speech recognition. Here is the quotation with a little more context (from the transcript):
"...Another theme is that [the digital lifestyle] has to work across these devices, whether it's calling people, seeing their presence, knowing what they're interested in, making it easy for them to navigate; it's got to be user centric, and that's a big theme that's going to make these things a lot simpler. Software is providing power, but software has got to provide simplicity. And that's why our investment levels are going up, investments in the toughest problems: security, privacy, speech recognition, video recognition, and all of those things will fold into this platform."
The user-centric focus couldn't be stronger: making it easier to deal with the devices and content of the expanding digital world is why we are in this business. Simple as that. Sure, it keeps getting tougher, the more devices that need to synchronize in some way and the more types of content that people can now get their ears and eyes around - but that's the exciting part! Multimodality, personalization, presence... all of these are things are arising from the inter-connections of devices and content navigation, and all of these things are rich areas for research and development in enhanced speech interfaces. It's a cool time to be in the speech recognition business!
