Google voice search can now hear what you've got to say
Need a better reason to say "OK Google" in public? Well, the search engine just announced a refinement to voice search on its research blog. Now, it can more accurately pick out your voice even in noisy surroundings, and perform the necessary analysis in real-time. This is all made possible by software that can make faster phoneme predictions by listening further ahead in a user's speech.
In addition to this, acoustic models utilize feedback loops to tell the difference between similar sounding letters. For example, the word "museum" is broken up into / m j u z i @ m/ in phonetic notation and normally the sounds made by "j" and "u" would be difficult to separate. But with feedback loops, the software takes in all letters and sounds at once, just as the word itself is said in one breath. This is achieved with the help of newly developed memory cells that work with a sophisticated gating system. You can test Google's upgraded digital ears on both Android and iOS now.
