Famous virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have gained popularity in the past decade. These voice command applications are useful because it is practical and easy to use. Various things can be done without touching your gadget, just say your command and voice control apps will get it done for you. You can do various things, such as playing music, viewing weather forecasts, sending short messages, and even creating a document.

History of voice control itself began in 1952 when Bell Laboratories created ‘Audrey‘. However, Audrey can only understand the numbers spoken by only a few people. In the 1960s, IBM released Shoebox, which could understand 16 words in English. In the following decades, voice control technology continues to grow. It could differentiate distinct voices and voice control machines learned more vocabularies.

In the 21st century, voice recognition was pioneered by the creation of Google Voice Search for the iPhone in 2008. Now Google Voice Search has changed to Google Assistant. The Google Assistant is also a complete voice control application for Android users. Three years later, Apple introduced Siri, a virtual assistant that can be used to operate iPhone devices and its applications. In 2014, Amazon released Alexa which was first used in the Amazon Echo and Amazon Echo Dot smart speakers.

The presence of a voice control system is beneficial in many aspects. First, voice control promotes efficiency and simplicity. We can get things finished faster by telling the voice control system to do something, then the machine will get it done for us. Second, voice recognition is useful to coordinate IoT devices. Common virtual assistants such as Google Home and Amazon Echo can be used for smart homes, which involves IoT-based devices. Another benefit, voice control can be used to improve security. For example, creating a password that must be said by a certain person could be a better security option.

However, there are several weaknesses to voice control. Not all words can be understood by the system accurately. In addition, if you are in a crowded place, voice control might not get what you are trying to say. It has to differentiate various sounds from the background when you are in a crowded place. The system’s vocabulary is also limited which leads to another problem.

Although it helps in everyday life, there are still some things that are better done manually than using voice control. Hopefully, in the future voice control technology will keep evolving and drilled to be better and always help our daily activities.

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Sources:

http://www.happyscribe.co/blog/history-voice-recognition/

https:/www.totalvoicetech.com/a-brief-history-of-voice-recognition-technology/

https:/www.totalvoicetech.com/how-voice-recognition-software-will-impact-your-life/

https://blog.firstagenda.com/3-pros-and-cons-of-using-speech-recognition-in-your-business

Featured image: https://techzillo.com/disable-voice-control/