Speech recognition is tech's next giant leap, says Google

AI robots and self-driving cars might steal the headlines, but the next big leap in technology will be advances in voice services, according to Google's head of search, Ben Gomes, who says that a better understanding of common language is crucial to the future of the internet. "Speech recognition and the understanding of language is core to the future of search and information," said Gomes . "But there are lots of hard problems such as understanding how a reference works, understanding what'he', 'she' or'it' refers to in a sentence. It's not at all a trivial problem to solve in language and that's just one of the millions of problems to solve in language." Gomes was speaking to the Guardian ahead of Google's 20th anniversary on 24 September, more than seven years after Google launched its first voice service as simple speech-to-text for search. Now built into Google's search and its AI voice assistant which is embedded in billions of smartphones around the globe, voice recognition has become essential in developing countries with low literacy rates.