3 Reasons Voice Will Finally Come To The Web

Voice is dead. Or at least the digerati think so. It takes some real digging in Silicon Valley to find the voiceheads, the true believers that voice will have its second coming as a Web application.

Today, most people think of Apple's Siri when you say voice app, but what if you could control all your apps with voice, and also search through spoken conversations and find content as easily as you do in email? At the very fringes of consumer and enterprise social interaction, this vision is already here. This emergent paradigm, known as hypervoice, promises to be a major boon for productivity. The real question is whether it will tip and become the next big shift in the Web.

It's kind of crazy that telephony and the Web are still so separate. Voice on the Web is only about the transport of voice, not voice as rich media content. Voice today is like Web 1.0 when Web content simply mimicked brochures. It's so boring, it hurts.

But what if voice was interactive like hypertext? What if we could search, share and find highlights from our conversations -- just like we do with text? Voice could go from a fringe player to a radical new social object with the potential to alter the way we communicate online.

These ideas may seem wild, but they are certainly not new. The voiceheads are quick to pull up their shirts to compare scars. With so many false starts, why is now the time for voice to become a member in good standing of the Web community? Here are three reasons.

1. Productivity #SOS

Today, voice solves only a space problem -- connecting two people across long distances in real time. But that model doesn't line up with how we work today. We work asynchronously, out of our email inboxes and social media activity streams. Live calls are increasingly disruptive to our workflow. Throwing in the pain of connecting across multiple time zones makes the need for a better way to work more pressing.

Text alone can't save us from this time-stretched, overloaded information stream. We need new tools, badly. Emerging hypervoice apps, where we can go back over our voice conversations and quickly find bits of information we need, will be like giving us perfect recall. Imagine augmented memory without an implant.

2. Viva La WebRTC!

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) drafted WebRTC as an API definition to enable browser-to-browser applications for voice calling, video chat and peer-to-peer file sharing without plug-ins. Today it's not trivial to put voice on the Web and make the pieces play nicely together, so it's hard to underestimate the impact that WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) will have on the development of future voice applications. Although the standard is still gathering form and adherents (e.g., Microsoft and Apple have not joined the party yet), WebRTC promises to make it whip simple for developers to integrate voice and video into their applications. By lowering technology barriers, new applications are likely to emerge quickly and seemingly out of left field. WebRTC will unleash the developers!

3. Say It: "Behavioral Changes"

People are starting to get comfortable talking to, not just through, their devices. We saw this nascent behavior shift start with Siri, and now it is likely to expand with Google's hotwording. These behavioral shifts are a critical step forward, as we have to get comfortable with voice as an interface. We need to move away from using our mobile devices as a typewriter.

It's critical, and yet ... Behavioral shifts are the hardest friction point to overcome. Social convention and etiquette change far slower than our technology advancements.

And while we are talking about barriers, one of the most pressing to overcome for hypervoice will be the acceptance of recording our voice conversations. As an early adopter, I have about two years of recorded conversations. I had assumed that people would be more off-put at the prospect of being "on the record." What has really surprised me is how little anyone seems to care. By regularly recording my conversations in a format that was simply searchable and shareable not only by me, but by them as well, my colleagues saw it as a boon for their own productivity, too.

So the real question is: Are we ready to trade our privacy for productivity? We have done it before, countless times. But in some ways, voice feels special. It feels like part of our personhood. And to this last point, time will only tell.

Link found between game theory and quantum

While research tends to become very specialized and entire communities of scientists can work on specific topics with only a little overlap between them, physicist Dr Nicolas Brunner and mathematician Professor Noah Linden worked together to uncover a deep and unexpected connection between their two fields of expertise: game theory and quantum physics.

Dr Brunner said: "Once in a while, connections are established between topics which seem, on the face of it, to have nothing in common. Such new links have potential to trigger significant progress and open entirely new avenues for research."

Game theory—which is used today in a wide range of areas such as economics, social sciences, biology and philosophy—gives a mathematical framework for describing a situation of conflict or cooperation between intelligent rational players. The central goal is to predict the outcome of the process. In the early 1950s, John Nash showed that the strategies adopted by the players form an equilibrium point (so-called Nash equilibrium) for which none of the players has any incentive to change strategy.

Quantum mechanics, the theory describing the physics of small objects such as particles and atoms, predicts a vast range of astonishing and often strikingly counter-intuitive phenomena, such as quantum nonlocality. In the 1960s, John Stewart Bell demonstrated that the predictions of quantum mechanics are incompatible with the principle of locality, that is, the fact that an object can be influenced directly only by its immediate surroundings and not by distant events. In particular, when remote observers perform measurements on a pair of entangled quantum particles, such as photons, the results of these measurements are highly correlated. In fact, these correlations are so strong that they cannot be explained by any physical theory respecting the principle of locality. Hence quantum mechanics is a nonlocal theory, and the fact that Nature is nonlocal has been confirmed in numerous experiments.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, Dr Brunner and Professor Linden showed that the two above subjects are in fact deeply connected with the same concepts appearing in both fields. For instance, the physical notion of locality appears naturally in games where players adopt a classical strategy. In fact the principle of locality sets a fundamental limit to the performance achievable by classical players (that is, bound by the rules of classical physics).

Next, by bringing quantum mechanics into the game, the researchers showed that players who can use quantum resources, such as entangled quantum particles, can outperform classical players. That is, quantum players achieve better performance than any classical player ever could.

Dr Brunner said: "Such an advantage could, for instance, be useful in auctions which are well described by the type of games that we considered. Therefore, our work not only opens a bridge between two remote scientific communities, but also opens novel possible applications for quantum technologies."