Voice controlled systems, a linguist's experience

Some of you know I have a post graduate degree in linguistics. Therefore it was immensely rewarding for me to support my son (of 13 yrs of age) when he agreed to work on a voice recognition programme demonstrating his oral Finnish while living outside of Finland, to contribute to a representative sampling of different variants of spoken Finnish for the machine to understand and act upon. Here are some observations I made from the effort as a linguist.

First of all, it truly amazes me how todays’ youth face technology with such ease and comfort, figuring out what to do and how to do it in split seconds, no hesitation. They are so tuned in with technology in their lives that it makes you wonder what great things they will end up developing in their life span. Huge potential, the sky is the limit.

This does bring me back to my previous topic of ethics. The instructions guided the recorder (my son) to disregard any words they felt unethical or not comfortable with. I was wondering what it could be until we hit one – it was a word that has a dual meaning in both Finnish and English (are you guessing what it might be? Well write your guess in the comments below if you will). The general meaning is neutral so I encouraged my son to go ahead and record it anyway. No idea if anyone will ever use this word to control the device but surely the device should ignore rough language? Or should it? What is the ethical thing to do here, when they program the algorithm and teach it to understand variants?

As a linguist, I encountered my son struggling with double consonants as well as double vowels, as was expected from third culture children with several languages. For him, studying in an IB academy in United Arab Emirates since he was five, English is naturally his strongest language, Finnish is his mother tongue and furthermore he learns French and Arabic, so there will be certain points he will struggle with, known to linguists from research, and mothers like me parenting such children. I’m not worried about these details as I embrace and appreciate the richness of knowing several languages (and cultures) from early on.

Speaking of technology, we do have a voice commanded device in our home which I use weekly. So far it does not recognize Finnish language so we use English to control it. From my experience you really have to concentrate in your pronunciation to get the device do what you want, in many cases it will not deliver the expected result but suggests something else or cannot find what I wanted, even though I have now trained it with the same command 10+ times – amazing. Well, live and learn. This technology in my view is not smart enough yet but getting there with the help of people like my son, contributing to the development.

Overall, I will be excited to participate in more of similar efforts in future, to bring technology to the expected level of user experience and beyond, linguistically or otherwise.