Voice Recognition in our Devices

A friend and I laughed the other day about how careful you have to be with various devices trying to understand voice commands that are not really meant to instruct the device. I remarked about how when I watch the movie Fool's Gold, there is a scene where Matthew McConaughey is flying a small plane with Kate Hudson. She asked him where he learned to fly. He replies, "PlayStation." It is a cute line for some one like me that is a fan of PlayStation. If I am watching the movie on my PlayStation 4, that is a keyword that brings up the voice command menu and my console waits there for a new command while the movie continues playing. Fortunately there isn't any dialog in the movie that turns itself off.

My friend commented about how smartphone devices have to be careful especially when being used inside a car. There has to be great care taken so that a voice command meant for a phone isn't interpreted by the car or visa versa.

I didn't think anything of this conversation until my wife and I drove back from vacationing in Aspen this past week. We got in the car and her phone quietly paired itself with our relatively new Jeep Cherokee. She pulled out the phone to get navigation directions to the hotel. Unbeknownst to us, the phone started using the hands-free feature built into the car to listen to our conversation. Nothing too strange happened but my wife did notice that the phone tried to figure out where we were going based off our conversation even though she also used the keyboard to enter our destination.

Fortunately our devices currently require some sort of activation before they try to interpret our voice commands. With the PlayStation 4, there is the "PlayStation" keyword. With the iPhone, it is holding down the round button on the bottom until you hear a ding. Hopefully engineers continue to pay attention to potential interference between devices. I would hate for a seemingly innocent conversation to be misinterpreted by my phone and suddenly all my contacts disappear.