COMMENTARY
AND CLEAR LOUD
Tactical speech recognition presents a variety of challenges that the Army is looking to overcome.
by Thom Hawkins and Dr. Reginald Hobbs T
his is a nightmare scenario for our Soldiers, but also sounds like a plausible dialogue given our collective experience with commer- cial virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa.
“Agent, provide data about that base.”
“I found ‘All About that Bass’ by Meghan Trainor. Do you want me to play it?” “Agent, no! Data about that base!”
Because you know I’m all about that bass, ‘bout that bass. No treble …
Tere’s a reason that we put up with the flaws—because we’ve been raised with high expectations for this type of interface. Voice interaction with artificial intelligence has a long history in Hollywood—from Robby the Robot of "Forbidden Planet" (1956) and HAL 9000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) through Tony Stark's JARVIS in "Iron Man" (2008) and Ava from "Ex Machina" (2014)— because the technology enables human-like interaction to further the film’s narrative without boring anyone with typing. Because of this familiarity bred through popular science fiction, we expect these voice interfaces to work, regardless of the environment and context.
Apple’s Siri, one of the first widely available virtual assis- tants, was introduced on the iPhone 4S in 2011. Many of our Soldiers have never owned a mobile phone that did not include such an agent. One of the biggest challenges we have to technology adoption is managing the expectations of users who are exposed not only to military technology, but also commercial. A user might be frustrated when an action on a hand-held device takes several more steps than it would on their own mobile phone.
Te use cases for automatic speech recognition in a tacti- cal environment include voice control, conversational artificial intelligence (AI) agents and content analysis of voice communication, all of which have roots in available commercial technology. Tough voice recognition and speech recognition are sometimes used synonymously, there is an important distinction between the two—voice recognition identifies people by the sound of their voices, while speech recognition identifies people by the content (i.e., words) of their speech.
PERFECTING VOICE COMMAND Automatic speech recognition has several advantages in a tactical environment. It enables us to multitask with a “heads-up, hands-free” approach. Natural language speak- ing is also the most effective way humans have to share information quickly. We want to be able to work with our
https://asc.ar my.mil 147
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176
