Voice Interface: The Touchscreen of the Next Century

“The Touchscreen of the Next Century”

The idea of making voice the primary way we interact with our smart devices is not just about the convenience of hands-free command or ease of use; it’s something more intuitive.

It’s more human.

“If you ask me ‘Why voice?’ or better yet, ‘Why are we talking to our devices?’ I’ll ask you a question in return: ‘What is the most natural interface between two sentient beings?’ The answer, of course, is speech,” says Sutton.

“The ways we have been interacting with machines up until now have been artificial because these machines haven’t been able to hear us. The natural way to communicate with something is to talk to it. This is not an evolution. We’re really getting back to basics—and these basics will have profound implications.

“Voice will be the touchscreen of the next century.”

A Series of Sonic Breakthroughs

Behind Sutton’s bold prediction lie several sonic breakthroughs he and his Yobe co-founders—Dr. S. Hamid Nawab, chief scientist, and James Fairey, senior advisor/audio innovation—have made in the fields of signal processing, artificial intelligence, and broadcast studio methodologies.

The fact that these innovations occurred over the course of 30 years in completely separate research fields—which Sutton likens with good humor to having as much in common as Spanish, Yiddish, and Vulcan—not only adds depth to Yobe’s “overnight” success story, but also a window into how brilliance, determination, good luck, and fate can intertwine to result in game-changing innovation.

A good place to start understanding the Yobe technology story is in the lab of Dr. Nawab.

Over the course of a distinguished 30-year career, Dr. Nawab used his advanced understanding of both signal processing and artificial intelligence—two highly specialized areas and skill sets rarely resident in the same person—to study an array of signal types including EMG signals, those biomedical markers that measure electrical currents during muscle contraction.

Fairey had stumbled upon a technique for signal repair. Manipulating signals typically damages them, which is one of many reasons, for example, that MP3 files can sound so tinny or hollow and why speech processing solutions sound artificial.

Yobe’s proprietary combination of signal processing, artificial intelligence, and broadcast studio techniques is overseen by a master adductive reasoning module that applies each discipline in exactly the right measure, audio frame by audio frame. Armed with this technology, Yobe is enhancing the performance of voice-enabled applications in noisy environments. These are the real environments in which we speak: ones with open windows, ambient sound, and the cacophony of conversation all around us.

In other words, it is the “cocktail party problem,” the signal-processing world’s way of framing one of its fundamental, longstanding challenges: isolating a single voice amidst the clatter of the real world’s sonic canvas.

“So much work in the voice recognition space is and has been done in controlled, sterile environments, which just isn’t where we as humans live, work, play, and talk,” says Sutton. “We took a different approach, and it has paid off.”

That said, Sutton is just as happy not to discuss Yobe’s accomplishments in terms of the cocktail party problem. He respects the efforts of others too much to take too much credit, preferring instead to say, “We’ve come up with a unique way of managing and dealing with it.”

That way is now leading to a new generation of applications and capabilities that are making our conversations with machines safer, more secure, and more productive. It is also ensuring that the touchscreen of the next century will operate well in the real world, not just in a soundproof room.