Emerging speech recognition technologies may be pertinent to those
who own apartments
in Bangalore and work in the cities thriving IT sector. Swiftly
advancing technologies capable of tasks which ten years ago were impossible to
be automated are emerging from companies which are capitalizing on colossal
data that has been gathered for over a decade. A new technology from the
Chinese search engine giant Baidu will now make it possible for people to text
message with greater speed and accuracy than ever before using only speech.
Speech recognition software was available nearly twenty years ago yet failed to
attract a large number of users as it was not very reliable at that time. Today
technologies are developing so rapidly that Baidu in collaboration with two
American universities has used its massive search engine database to create
language recognition software that is more accurate and faster than some of the
fastest humans who type.
Clearly, technology is rapidly evolving and as more people time
online punching in queries on search engines, newer ways to map human thought
shall emerge. Features such as Google Instant search would likely never have
emerged before they did nearly six years had Google not already had an idea of
the kinds of keywords people use to search. Now the Chinese, which had banned
Google more than a decade ago, have a huge corpus of data also gleaned from the
thought patterns of living humans which allow them to digitalize the spoken
word into a written format faster than was possible earlier. To be fair, Baidu
has an advantage recognizing words as spoken and written Chinese are virtually
identical. Yet the thoughts behind the written and spoken and words are similar
across languages and hence the fact that a newer speech recognition language
emerges by the efforts of the Chinese search engine giant is unsurprising.
CEO’s who live in luxury
apartments in Bangalore should take note of a large number of newer
formidable technologies emerging from China while IT workers in Bangalore
continue to carry out relatively routine and mundane tasks. Bangalore may lose
its edge as a center of IT to China if efforts are not made to develop
innovative technologies which can rival or surpass those emerging elsewhere
across the globe.
Millions of search queries are typed into a single search engine
each day, the data gleaned from such search results is gold to IT companies
even as it generates revenue for the search engine. Top
builders in Bangalore today
rely on Google for much of their advertising; a high page rank by Google is
prized by many builders and developers
in Bangalore. Yet despite the fact that the CEO of Google is of Indian
origin most of the benefits which accrue from Indian search queries go into
American hands. Baidu is a credible threat to Google’s worldwide dominance. The
ability to use language to map human thoughts will likely be crucial to
developing newer technologies and may even be at the core of developing strong
Artificial Intelligence.
A viable domestic search
engine is crucial, even if such an engine is developed and promoted by the
public sector. Upcoming projects in
Bangalore, advertised on the big three search engines such as Google,
Bing, and Yahoo, will be better served by a powerful domestic search engine
whose page ranking mechanism better takes into account Indian businesses and
the Indian mentality. Advertising from technologies for industries such as real
estate which includes luxury and affordable
property in Bangalore
should be in domestic hands. Western publications such as the New York Times
prognosticated dire times ahead for China’s economy when the Chinese government
banned Google in China, however, today, China’s local search engine is the
model IT company which has mountains of useful data it can use to benefit
Chinese business and to develop next generation technologies.
