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Each company with enough money to
spare
and enough egotism to believe that it can shape everyone's future now
has a '
natural language
' research group.
Films
and TV series set in the future use computers with voice interfaces to
show how far technology has advanced from our own primitive day and age. The unwritten assumption is that
talking to your house will in the end be as natural as shouting at your relatives.
The roots of this shared delusion lie in the
genuine
naturalness of spoken communication between humans. Meaning
is transferred from person to person so effortlessly that it must be the best way of transferring information from a
human to another object.
This view is misguided on many different levels. First people are so good at talking and at understanding what others
say because they share a common
genetic
heritage. Children's brains are hard-wired with a general language
structure that they then apply to the surrounding spoken-word environment. The old view that language is learned
by copying parents and other adults has been discredited in recent years, to be replaced by the theory that words
are attached to a pre-existing structure in the child's mind in such a way that
grammar
'emerges', as it were, rather
than is taught.
This view of human language, added to shared human experience, shows how people understand each other
precisely in a conversation where a
transcript
would make little sense. Unfinished sentences, in-jokes,
catchphrases,
hesitation
markers like 'er' and 'you know', and words whose meaning is only clear in the context of
that one conversation are no bar to human understanding, but baffled early attempts at computer
speech
recognition
.
Recent advances in
artificial intelligence
address the problem - but only in part.
Pioneering
linguistic
research by scientists has
revealed
much of the underlying structure of human language, so
much so that programmers can now
mimic
that structure in their software and use statistical and other techniques to
make up for the lack of shared experience between operator and machine.
Some of the obvious drawbacks of universal
voice control
have already been countered. The dreadful prospect of an
office full of people talking to their machines has brought about the
headset
and the throat
microphone
; these also
address the fact that people
feel
ridiculous talking to something which is non-human. The increasing
sophistication
of
voice-processing and
linguistic
-
analysis tools
cuts out the dangers of
inaccurate
responses to input, preventing the
computer from having to respond to every single word
uttered
, no matter how nonsensical in the overall context.
The
fundamental
objection to
natural language
interfaces is that they're about as unnatural as you can get. You
might be able to order a computer about in its limited sphere of action, but it'll never laugh at your jokes, make
sarcastic comments, volunteer
irrelevant
but interesting information or do any of the other things that make real
human conversation so fascinating. If interaction is limited to didactic instruction from human to computer, why use
up valuable
processing time
performing the immensely difficult task of decoding language correctly? To keep your
hands free? For what, precisely?
There's another psychological reason why language control is difficult: the decline in
domestic
service throughout this
century, the absence of military experience from the lives of the last two generations, and the flattening out of
business management have all combined to produce a population that's not accustomed to giving
crisp
orders and
expecting them to be obeyed
Controlling a computer by word power works best if you imitate a
drill
sergeant, avoiding all 'could you's' and 'would
you mind's' that most of us use when trying to
coerce
someone into doing something they'd rather not do. This
modern li of the servant problem opens up the chance of
ambiguity
and error when interacting with a machine.
It could be said, though, that it's just as well we've forgotten how to give orders. Slaves always have had a
reputation for conspiring against their master's backs.
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