未来手机能否读懂你的心思

PATTON OSWALT, an American comedian, once told a story about a text exchange with his girlfriend. “I love you,” she texted. Mr Oswalt began to reply “I love you too.” Only the grouchy comic got as far as “I…” and the predictive texting program began to fill out the text based on his habits. “…hate…”, it provided. Mr Oswalt hit “send” before he could stop himself, and his poor girlfriend ended up receiving a rather offensive text.
帕顿·奥斯瓦尔特是一名美国喜剧演员，他跟观众讲过自己与女朋友短信交流的故事。“我爱你”，女友在短信中写道。奥斯瓦尔特先生准备回复“我也爱你”。只有爱发牢骚的喜剧演员才懂得“我...”的句式效果，这时文字预测功能开始根据他的习惯自动填写短信，所写的内容是：“...恨...”。奥斯瓦尔特先生还没来得及反应，手一抖就按了“发送”键，结果他女友收到了这条冒犯意味十足的短信。

Johnson would expect Mr Oswalt's relationships to have moved on from such moments of communicative meltdown. Predictive texting was fairly new in 2009, when Mr Oswalt told his gag. But five years later, smarter and faster processors, plus better wireless broadband, have allowed smartphones to do much better at predicting what users mean, and what they are likely to say next. Apple has implemented new elements of language analysis and prediction in iOS8, its latest mobile operating system, for texting both with thumbs and with speech recognition.
笔者约翰逊希望奥斯瓦尔特先生与女友的关系不要因为这种沟通失败而泡汤。2009年，奥斯瓦尔特先生向观众讲这个噱头时，文字预测还是比较新奇的功能。但是五年后的今天出现了更快更智能的处理器和更先进的无线宽带，使智能手机能更好的预测用户的心思以及下一句想要说什么。苹果公司为最新的手机操作系统IOS8提供了新的语言分析和预测元素，适用于手指打字和语音识别。

Speech recognition relies on a big database of natural human English text. An unclear word can be disambiguated by the words around it, as the software tries to match a string of words to a string in its database. If the computer hears "Four score and seven [mumble] ago", it can scan its database and guess that the missing word is probably "years".
语音识别技术依靠普通人类英语文本大型数据库。当软件听到一连串单词时，会从数据库中搜索与之相匹配的语句。所以当软件遇到一个发音模糊的单词时，可根据其前后其他单词来消除歧义。例如，当计算机听到“四十七[发音模糊]前”，它会搜索数据库猜测没听清的那个单词可能是“年”。

In iOS7, the user had to dictate an entire passage, hit “done”, and wait for the (usually quite accurate) text to appear after a second or two. In iOS8, though, things get more interesting: the words appear nearly as they are spoken. The real-time appearance of each word allows the curious language pundit to peer into the software’s mind. I tried a deliberate “Four score and seven rrrrs ago.” Each of the first four words appeared almost instantly. After the rrrrs, the system paused for a brief moment, before offering “years ago” on the screen. The software clearly thought “hmm, rrrrs sounds like nothing in my database. But this ‘four score and seven’ is almost always followed by the word ‘years’, and the ‘ago’ seems to prove it.”
在IOS7系统中，用户必须先口述一整段语音，点击“完成”键，一两秒后语音被转化成文字，准确率一般都很高。在IOS8系统中，该功能变得更为有趣：语音和文字几乎是同步的。由于每个单词可以实时出现，因此语言专家可以分析软件的思维方式。我故意说了“四十七rrrrs前”，前四个单词中的第一个单词几乎立刻出现。当我说到rrrrs时，系统短暂停顿后在屏幕上显示出“年前”。软件明显在想：“嗯...我的数据库中找不到rrrrs的发音，但“四十七”后面经常出现“年”这个单词，而“前”这个单词似乎证明了这一点。

To check my intuition, I tried “rrrrs” for “years” in several situations where "years" is not the obvious word, including a classic line from "Raiders of the Lost Ark": “It’s not the years, honey—it’s the mileage.” The software returned things like “It’s not the errors honey it’s the mileage,” and “It’s not Thursday honey it’s the mileage.” The line obviously isn’t in Apple’s training text as frequently as “Four score and seven years ago.”
为了验证我的直觉判断，我在多个情景中将“年（years）”说成了“rrrrs”，在这些情景中单词“年（years）”并不是显而易见就能推测出来的，包括《夺宝奇兵》中的经典台词：“关键不在于车龄，宝贝，而在于行驶里程”。这时软件显示出的文字是：“关键不在于错误（errors），宝贝，而在于行驶里程”，以及 “关键不在于周四（Thursday），宝贝，而在于行驶里程”。这句话在苹果数据库中出现的频率明显不如 “四十七年前”。

Another much-touted advance in iOS8 is predictive text for typing. When composing a text or e-mail, users see three words above the keyboard at any given time—the three words Apple reckons they are most likely to use next. As with speech recognition, the software must first be trained on a bunch of actual English text. But Apple also claims that the software learns from each individual user over time.
苹果IOS8系统中另一个备受追捧的进步是打字预测功能。当用户在编辑文字或电子邮件时，随时能看到键盘上会浮现出三个单词，苹果认为这三个单词是你接下来最有可能用到的。与语音识别同理，这款软件也必须事先接受真实英语文本的训练。但苹果也表示该软件随着时间也会学习单个用户的使用习惯。