VOICE IS THE FUTURE

Nearly 30% of the businesses all around the globe, probably by 2018, would “conversate” with their smart technologies, through voice!

Phenomenal growth and standardization in the telephony voice market and speech recognition technologies has driven the need for enhancing the existing enterprise applications running on the visual web. With Apple adding Siri to iOS some six years ago, correspondingly earmarking the inception of voice as the most natural means of communication possible with those exotic inventions, it is very likely to hope the consumer landscape getting transformed on devices from smartphones, to smartwatches, to smart speakers! Google Assistant and Alexa are paving their way as well in workplaces to an extent, and so are Cortana and Google Home, however intended for a home assistance. Though they seem to be very feasible when it comes to home acclimatization, these voice-activated virtual assistants are yet to truly break through in the enterprise.

That isn't really to say that most enterprises don't already accomplish business tasks using these virtual assistants. Many of us rely on them for quick tasks such as getting directions, scheduling appointments and responding to messages. But, it has been quite the same as it had been back in 2011!

VOICE DID TURN OUT TO BE A GAME CHANGER!

Voice is indeed a blessing mankind has been endowed with. It is spontaneous, intuitive, and highlighting a great deal of context. It is much more agreeable that touch, or even a tap, would not be as prolific to render a message, as a simple “ask” would rather be; neither does a tap on our smartphone succeed in integrating digitalization into our very lives, by failing to be customer-centric in the first place! Obviously as it is so, using your voice doesn’t pre-require you to get acquainted with something as a user interface, neither you need something like an app to govern you with the guidelines of getting a task done.  

And it was not until Apple pounced in with Siri, that voice enabled enterprises have become so alluring to the entrepreneurs. This has indeed become palpable because of the following juxtaposing advances in the computing world:

• Access to large scale voice training data
• Plausible exalts in softwares’ efficiencies using the processing engines such as Caffe and MXNet
• Surge of massively parallel compute engines with low latency memory access, such as the Amazon EC2 P3 Instances, much notorious in the computing world

 

THE CHALLENGES TO LOOK AT!

Well, with the advent of everything mankind has been a witness to, hurdles have been creeping in in the name of a few possible augmentations.

One impediment has been the ability to manage voice-controlled interactions and devices at scale. And Alexa For Business has currently been an apprentice to Amazon, who is grasping a set of skills intending to win over this very sovereignty  held by the physics of acoustics. Alexa For Business has been successful in voice-enabling workspaces, corporate applications, people and of course, customers! Science here does call for a few prerequisites though, as listed down below:

• A management layer of course, which is where an Alexa For Business would play in
• A set of APIs to integrate with your IT apps and infrastructure
• Judiciously installed voice-enabled devices, almost everywhere, a bit like the “Divide & Rule” policy embraced by the British colonies

“People are being misled by things like Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, and Alexa, which are still very much first-generation products -- clever but still first-generation clever! Too many of these technologies still can't go beyond single-threaded conversations and into multi-threaded conversations with even basic context.”

- Ian Cohen (Digital Advisor)

Alexa For Business is now able to control the environment, help you find directions, book a room, report an issue, or find transportation, and most of all, avoid silly procrastinations in meetings! The administrator just needs to configure the conference rooms (she even shows whether a room would be/is available for something like a parallel meeting) and integrate the calendars to the devices. On the day of business, you need to give her an errand, “Alexa, start the meeting!”, and there you go. She knows what the meeting is from the calendars you have already integrated; she mines the dial-ins, reports to the conference host, and begins with the meeting, within seconds.

CONCLUSION!

Without a doubt, voice is already in the enterprise, powering productivity and collaboration efforts. But even after more than half a decade in the market, voice remains in its infancy. The revolution it offers is coming, but the needed confluence of hardware, platform, apps and workflows isn't in place yet to capture its potential.

Great minds have indeed been concentrating on capturing that potential, and the future of voice does seem to lie in responsible hands!

THE ALLURE OF TECHNOLOGY

I stumbled across a video on YouTube a few years back, when I got conversant with this amazing insinuation of technology in the human world, aiming at making lives much more comfortable and emollient. I found this guy laid back in his sofa, soliciting his iPhone (shown to be on one end of that cubicle - well, exaggerated advertising I thought!) to draw him to the next fixture of the Seattle Seahawks. Within a few seconds, it was a woman’s voice that chipped in with the answer! My eyes went on looking across that oblong screen for the woman with that embellished voice, but couldn’t find her there. It wasn’t a phantom - I had certainly heard her. Well then, over the next two and a half hours, I got myself familiar with this aesthetic voice (there was no specious woman there, sorry!), who had been christened Siri, the obedient errand girl as they say.

Well, I would try my best not to sound esoteric. Siri, is an intelligent personal assistant, part of Apple Inc.’s iOS (and a few more) operating systems. Many do claim this to be a revolution, a revolution in technology, that allows the user to communicate with technology in the most natural way possible - by using his/her voice! A spontaneous and an intuition-driven gift mankind has been endowed with, can well be accredited today as a universal user interface. Moreover, your accents and oratory propensities need not to be complied for use by an app (though you aren’t allowed to hold on to any ambiguity with your commands); voice interfaces do not require any app to interpret what you ask your device to do! The contemporary compute engines with low-latency memory access (one for instance is the Amazon EC2 P3 Instances, a novice for now), an appreciable access to large scale voice training data, plus the groundbreaking accrusions in the softwares of the processing engines (Caffe and MXNet, to list down), have indeed molded a feigned possibility of voice processing in a prolific endeavor.

Down the line with my curiosity as a techie, I was fortunate enough to find Alexa, a cloud based voice service developed by Amazon Inc., who has been learning variegated skills, skills that extend well beyond the consumer space, as Amazon Inc. proposes. Science does hold its limitations for certain and does go on confronting pedagogical hurdles on the way, but great minds have indeed been working on asymptoting even more closer to the desired infallibility in technology, so as to ensconce far stretches of the globe beneath the marvels of such a proud ontogenesis. One of the pricking impediments has been the ability to deal with voice-controlled interactions and devices at scale, and something like an Alexa for Business has been introduced to pave in a solution. Amazon Inc. assures you of getting your spaces, corporate applications, people and customers voice-enabled, with Alexa for Business, so as to ease out both the companies and the developers with her ever-growing skill sets. She has indeed been an asset in initiating board meetings on time!

Well, Siri has always been reminiscent of that splendid enticement, which I had helplessly fallen prey to, leaving behind my vagabond mind with an agglomeration of possibilities to ponder over! Though Siri has been censured with a few shortcomings with the flow of time, Alexa has indeed been clever enough to cover most of those. Such an outlook which always looks for a better acclimatization with the exalting demands, has indeed excited a sense of pertinacity among the big-bellies out there, and there is certainly much to look forward to in the years to come!

Well, Google Inc. doesn't seem to be much far behind as well, with Google Home & Google Gnome (exotic name that!) making way for themselves!

MY SOURCE OF MOTIVATION

All my life so far, especially since I have been able to respond to my emotions and relate myself to this wonderful journey called life, there has been somebody behind my every minuscule step, guiding me to stroll on the shores of satisfaction and pleasure, amidst every wave of responsibility that I needed to shoulder. My Dad. The only friend I have in my life so far, with whom I believe I do get ensconced beneath the showering affection and with whom everything does turn out to be justifiably simpler. I have never been able to portray a confident posture in my childhood, even though my Dad believed every time that I had the caliber in me and it was just a veil that my low self-confidence was being used as. The only concern was to remove the veil away so that I could well picturise myself to the world and to an extent, I do believe that I have been able to do so. This would not have been possible for me if I would have been devoid of the motivation required in the process, the emotional push – up which only would be expected of a benign personality that my Dad holds.

Anybody who is able to comprehend you genuinely as a person generally becomes the one whom you
love and adore. That’s why my Dad has been a revered figure to look at. He has been quiet successful, I believe, in molding me into a personality that views life from the perspective it needs to be viewed. He has been able to hold me up whenever I had got bogged down, making me realize that there is a big deviation between
what needs to be done and what you feel is apt for the moment; that’s what pushes necessity far from desires! He has laid a lot of emphasis on making me realize what the beholding situation really recites in, and any sort of an impulsion has never been a part of such a tender relation we share. It is worth mentioning here that in spite of being at loggerheads on several subtle aspects of my life so far, I have been able to find a room for motivating myself to give my decision a second thought, and eventually revise my paradigm.

My Dad has always had the skill to make me realize the prudency expected out of a
circumstance, rather than a possibly austere propensity. A simple man, with simple habits and a simple meaning of life as I go through his
dictionary – this has sincerely helped me to have
a rather precise perspective towards life, which I believe has helped us both to earn the satiety in pleasure and contentment. Right from pushing me up off the complex of stammering I have, to making me realize the significance of an Engineering degree ahead in my life (which did seem a lot trivial to me considering it’s
deteriorating teaching quality here in India - that's why India doesn’t beget efficient Engineers I guess), he has obliged himself to the fatherly role quite appreciably, and thankfully.

Alas, it becomes ineffable in a way when it comes to expressing what a fatherly figure genuinely means to you, peculiarly when you find yourself in the shoes of a doted child! Shaping me up into the character I hold, rather than running behind developing my personality, has been a conscious effort of my Dad, and this has indeed motivated me in molding myself into the character he has always wished for. Someone can really become of an utmost importance in your life that

you blindly can credit that someone for what and who you really feel of yourself, as a human being. Probably, that’s what fathers are meant for!

Do pay a visit to my Dad on LinkedIn, if you like. Simply click over his smiling face! ⇛

THE 'GENEROUS' IMMOLATION!

Just in a brief....


She might be a beautiful imagination of valor made by the poets in 1500s;

she might be an epitome of how influential a woman can be, rather has been in the lost pages of the poignant history of our country we could always be ostentatious of;

she might even be the sole soul in a family who could proudly stand alone under the dark clouds hovering over, as an intimidating wall of defense whenever asked for;

she might be the woman you could find everywhere around you, she doesn't need to be someone high up in the hierarchy; 

yet, 

time has been blatantly treacherous on her all the way down since the apes evolved into humans, that has left her to be looked upon only as a body of utter tragic sacrifice as and when called for, that does prolong even today…

Bitterly unfortunate and something bringing blemishes upon the so called "civilized" society of humans as a whole...

#RaniPadmavati