The man in charge of speech technology at Google is looking to a future where what we say can be searched, translated and transcribed in the blink of an eye.
Google's Mike Cohen has explained that after working on projects like automatic YouTube captioning, voice search and speech to speech translation the spoken word has become increasingly important to the search giant.
Cohen believes that Google is the ideal company to create tools that will break down barriers – meaning that the things we say can be instantly transcribed, searchable or even made available in other languages.
Lots of power needed
"Speech technology requires an enormous amount of data to feed our statistical models and lots of computing power to train our systems—and Google is the ideal place to pursue such technical approaches," blogged Cohen.
"We envision a comprehensive interface for voice and text communication that defies all barriers of modality and language and makes information truly universally accessible. And it's here at Google that I think we have the best chance to make this future a reality."
It's a dream of TechRadar's journos to have a programme that accurately writes up audio interviews, and we can't help but think that being able to search through your own conversations would settle the "you said…no I didn't" arguments.
And, no doubt, create a whole new set of arguments in its wake. But that's progression.
