Use Your Words, Kid
What happens when toddlers begin learning to talk by speaking to the Internet — and the Internet speaks back?
Today the internet is words and copy, but soon the internet will be speech. As in we’ll speak more and more often to the Memex, and the Memex will speak back to us. Maybe that’s no big maraca to you. But imagine what happens when all human knowledge is a spoken word away and your kids start talking at age two.
Today, toddlers play learning apps on mom’s iPad. They wear language learning wearables. But tomorrow, your kids will be learning how to talk, in part, by speaking with whatever products come after Amazon Echo. Or Google Home. Or the CogniToys Dino Green. That means at least some of your child’s fundamental language learning will occur by talking to devices in their house — and that’s at least two full years before even the smartest of them begin to read.1
Consider: for us, Google was the command line to knowledge. All you had to do was go to google.com and ask a question. But asking a question presumed hierarchies of knowledge: how to read, how to write, how to use a computer, how to open a browser, how to find google, how to know what to ask it, how to read the results. By the time we could search all of human knowledge, we already had a substrate of human knowledge. We were human-raised before we were machine-assisted.
But voice AI speeds that up. Voice AI really speeds that up. To age two. And how will that change a toddler’s understanding of the world, or her expectation of interacting with the world, or her development of language?2 Will she learn more quickly? Because that’s what’ll be happening on the neural network end of those billions of spoken queries per day. What a pretty picture. A neural network and a neocortex, learning together. From the mouth of babes, better AI.
- IOW, the biggest reduction of friction between a user and the platform, ever.
2. Further reading: The Impossibility of Being Literal and I Is An Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World.
Originally published on Dicks & Betties: the soylent email made out of people.
