Chinese tech players take aim at Apple's talking tech Siri beware - a handful of major Chinese telecoms operators, handset manufacturers and other tech firms have joined up to form the Speech Industry Alliance of China (SIAC), a new group which will look at exploiting the growing domestic appetite for speech-based applications. The not-for-profit includes founder members such as …
That Siri isn't really about voice recognition (that's fairly old tech), it's about natural language processing of the converted voice data, context mapping and AI processing to give you something akin to a human response.
As a side effect of the process Apple are getting a really good data set of voice samples to improve their conversion accuracy, which is about all these guys will be competing with.
It seems to be the same tactic used in school yards all over the world. If a bigger kid starts bullying everyone else, the only way to really deal with it is to get together and make a stand.
Of course if the environment didn't encourage this sort of behaviour in the first place then this wouldn't need to happen.
The Chinese market is the largest in the world but as they
A) don't want to pay for anything and have no enforceable copyright laws, and
B) murder westerners who get. Involved with their political elite
I'm not sure it's a market I would like to get involved with. Apple are trying but I'm not sure it's worth it.
dialectical differences in the pronunciation of the so-called «common language» (普通话) are many and not infrequently mutually unintelligible. One can't help wondering if, given the prevalence of smart phones and what seems to be a desire for voice recognision and natural language processing technology in that country, these latter are going to do as much, if not more to standardise the Chinese spoken language than radio and television have done these last six decades....
Henri
The Register 
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