Something You Should Know
Real Solutions for Everyday Anxiety & The Evolution of Talking Computers
29 May 2025
What fascinating things can your eyes do?
I mean, that's an excellent question. I do history. I've never considered myself much of a futurist, but history can tell us something about the patterns that we can expect to see. If we look back at the history of both speech synthesis and speech recognition, one of the threads of research
happened to be for the purpose of creating a text to speech machine for folks who were blind or maybe had disabilities of their speech organs or something like that. And so there certainly are incredible uses for folks who who need to interact with computers in certain ways. And of course, most of us need to interact with computers in this day and age.
But as many things go, the thrust of development is always towards things that you can make money off of. And so a lot of those applications, of course, are consumer applications like Alexa. Interestingly, I don't know if people can even remember back this far, but right before ChatGPT went public, am Ende von, was war das, 2022, hat Amazon ihren Alexa-Team größtenteils gesperrt.
Und das war ein Teil davon, weil ich denke, und das ist einfach, ich weiß nicht, es gibt ein bisschen Forschung darüber, aber wir wissen, dass die Leute es meistens benutzen, wie du gesagt hast, um den Zeitpunkt zu fragen, um es Musik zu spielen, um es zu fragen, was das Wetter war, vielleicht um zu fragen, ob es Stockquote gibt, aber nichts, was Amazon wirklich wert war.
But then we got large language models in the public. And so in the last two years, there's been a push again to make speech the interface of our interactions with those large language models. And I don't know where that will take us, to be honest.
but we see kind of the same things recur that have recurred for the last 60, 70 years, and that we've been told they are the answer to things like a lot of our health-related issues, so promoting elder care and that kind of thing, or our educational issues, so to make education more... Interactive with children using these kinds of programs.
And this is supposed to offload labor from people like teachers and nurses and so on and so forth. I'm a little skeptical. You might hear that in my voice. I'm a little skeptical about some of those applications. But I will say that with computing, with eras of computing, we've actually seen those promises over and over again since the 1950s.
Nun, wie du sagst, wenn du nicht Geld dafür bekommst, ist es nicht so wichtig, es zu entwickeln. Aber weil es eine Stimme ist, weil es die menschliche Stimme synthetisiert, scheint es da ein bisschen Potenzial zu haben, oder?
Therapie, zum Beispiel, durch Chatbots. Das ist auch etwas, das bis in die 60er-Jahre zurückgegangen ist, das eine Menge Kontroversie verursacht hat, um deinen Therapeuten nicht ein Computerprogramm zu sein, sondern eher als eine Person. Aber ich denke, sie werden es wahrscheinlich immer weiterarbeiten. Wir sehen viel Hype darüber, People having relationships with these chatbots.
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