Monkees (or even birds) have a language of sorts, but they do not have speech. Gorillas can understand some words but they can't speak. Do parrots speak when they say words without understanding the meaning?
We humans have a terrible tendency to underestimate the capabilities of animals. In the case of the apes, they may not be very good at verbal speech, but they do amazingly well with gestural speech, i.e., sign language, and other non-verbal language forms. This is not some trick or mere "parroting", but true, conversational language including abstraction, generalizations, emotion, creation of new words, well-defined syntax, etc., etc. This is not to suggest that there is no difference between humans and apes, but that the mere presence of language isn't one of them. In fact, there is good reason to believe that the larger part of human evolution was characterized by other than verbal speech.
Hopefully the need for speech recognition training will eventually go away
The operative word there is eventually. Increasing processor power and evolving software is likely to get better and better at simple applications like telephone response systems where the number of legitimate answers can be limited and there are fallback communication options, but I am afraid that I am not optimistic about any near term success in producing general purpose systems on the order of a cell phone sized device that could be used by any operator without training. As I have written in the past, I am afraid this goes with using the wrong core approach ... there is only so much one can do with a bigger hammer. |
