Voice recognition engines are getting more popular than ever. Gone are the days when controlling a device required human touch. In the earlier phase of voice recognition engine research, they could only read stuff out like some speech to text converters. However, in the modern voice recognition engines touch of artificial intelligence (AI) is heavily implied and as a result, you can even use daily life catch-phrases and your device will still understand what you meant to say.
Tool from Expect Labs
Expect Labs has been doing their research works on a new voice recognition engine for a long time now; and finally they have been able to create a voice recognition app that just doesn’t recognize speech like the popular voice engines like Siri, Google voice search or Cortana rather it truly brings an evolution in the AI field mostly. Very lately the company has been able to raise around $13 million funding for their project and the investment partners include companies like Samsung, Telefonica and Intel. Being launched in 2012; impressing companies like the mentioned and raising such a bigger fund is truly a success in the technology world.
MindMeld API
Well, the company is specifically developing an API; not an actual application by themselves. If you do not know what APIs are – it’s the abbreviated form for Application Program Interface. An app requires different sets of procedures to be written in forms of algorithms and functions in order to properly and promptly work inside anoperating system environment. Developers may release pre-developed APIs which would further mitigate the hassle of building everything from the scratch. In this case, having a conversational speech engine can help the developers to put the AI based speech recognition within any app they are developing, hence it will be able to recognize speech and voice commands while running on a computer or smartphone environment.
Voice recognition apps like Siri, Cortana and Google voice search is ruling three different platforms right now; but the MindMeld API is built to be incorporated with existing apps. Any desktop or smartphone based app, internet surfers or other compatible software type could be associated with a voice & speech recognition feature using the MindMeld API. The API is a developer level tool; until the users have some expertise on computer programming – may not find the actual usage of the MindMeld API.
API.AI
The API.AI is a tool that integrates the speech to text or voice recognizing tools into an under-development app. The algorithm and functionality will be converted into the speech recognition feature functionalities. The basic feature list include very high performance, having the necessary bits of information integrated into the system, conversation support easier incorporation of everyday and real life conversations, cross platform support for all popular smartphone OS e.g. iOS, Android and Windows and web languages like Unity, Python etc. The tool provides support for 11 languages thus the integration is made much easier on API.AI.
Depending on the smartphone API.AI may sync with the existing voice engine frameworks like Siri or Cortana, etc. You can visit their website to check the pricing of Api.ai. It is completely free for non-commercial use.
Conclusion
Any developer wishing to work on speech recognition and voice command may improve their expertise on APIs like MindMeld and tools like API.AI. Practical knowledge on such framework and tools will certainly leave a positive impact on their upcoming developments.