Voice Recognition Explained & How Does Ford Sync 3 Work?

Take a look at the recent versions of Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and Ford's SYNC infotainment system.

So, how does our smartphone, tablet or car decipher the things we say and respond accordingly? Here is a basic idea:

1. It is not about the sound; it is the sound wave that comes out when we say something:

Computers are not like people; they need to a way to "hear" the words that are said and turn them into text. With the repeated process, the computer digitises the sound for it to understand.

If the computer detects a gap in the sound wave, what gets measured may not be correct.

2. The sound of a word vs. the sound of something else:

The computer has to detect if the sound is from the engine, radio or a chunk of digitised sound are indeed words. The computer applies a bunch of mathematical operations to segregate what is speech and what is not.

3. Same word, different accents:

Voice recognition works by breaking up the speech into small segments called Phonemes or Phonetics. The computer is trained to recognise what each speech segment looks like in digital form, but they are not always the same.

Mark Porter, Supervisor, Asia Pacific Infotainment Systems, Ford Motor Company says "With enhanced voice recognition, you can talk to SYNC 3 with simple real-world voice commands, and the system responds naturally to your voice,"

He added, "It's even been fine-tuned to deal with the Australian accent, and in China, it can understand a string of Chinese characters written by hand on its graphical interface."

4. Predicting what the next word in a sentence:

In a sentence, there can be different word combinations in a single speech stream; this is because there are a lot of phonemes that sound similar to one another when spoken quickly.

Sometimes the result can be a wacky sequence of words which might not make sense. To avoid this, the computer applies models based on how people talk to decide how likely one word should follow another.

5. Presenting the best result as quickly as possible:

Once the computer makes all the calculations are done, and guesses are made, it can finally give its best result, be it on the screen, a preset menu or even coming up with a vocal response.

Mr Porter says "New, state-of-the-art voice recognition technology can achieve incredibly fast response times and are more intuitive than ever before. A user of SYNC 3 can command their car to ‘Tune to FM', while other systems still require you to say ‘Radio' then points you to another list and prompts you again to say the frequency of the radio station you want to listen to."

With accurate and real-time technology being available in the recent times, voice activated commands are making our lives easier, better and simpler in different ways.

While at times it may seem like your device is just out to annoy you with its bizarre answers, consider all the tedious calculations and multiple transformations it has to do behind-the-scenes to recognise a single word, let alone an entire sentence.

For your gadget to be even remotely able to decipher what you say and then add a semi-coherent response is phenomenal, especially since some humans are still trying to master this skill.

The Ford Endeavour SUV is the only model with the SYNC 3 voice recognition feature in all of Ford's models in India. Below is an extensive photo gallery of the SUV, click to view.