Meet Google=?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=99s_?=Voice Hunter On A Quest For 300 Lang uages (fwd link)

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Meet Google’s Voice Hunter On A Quest For 300 Languages

BY E.B. BOYD Mon Aug 8, 2011

Google wants Voice Search to master the Tower of Babel. So Linne Ha
travels the world, gathering the language samples used to train it.

Google’s Voice Search, which launched on cellphones in 2008 and was
added to the desktop in June, seems like such a simple proposition.
You speak your query into your phone (or computer), and, ta-da, the
system pops out an answer.

But teaching Google’s voice bot to understand what users are saying
isn’t simple at all. And if you’re trying to get it to speak all the
languages in the world, it’s even more complicated.

Enter Linne Ha (pictured, right), Google’s Voice Hunter. Her official
title is "International Program Manager, Google Voice Search," but Ha
spends her days crisscrossing the globe, gathering the voice samples
needed to train the voice bot, the way a lepidopterist might go
hunting for rare butterflies.

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http://www.fastcompany.com/1772012/meet-google-s-voice-hunter?partner=gnews