Strap yourselves in! Jeff Rodman, co-founder of Polycom in 1990 and today, our Chief Evangelist, offers his guest view on the technology likely to shape our industry in the decade ahead:
Major technologies are emerging in all fields today. Which of these are the keystones that can drive human collaboration? And how will they affect – and be affected by – the ways that people work together? This is a look at some of these trends, now and coming, and which of these, from social change to synthetic intelligence and metamaterials, will change our everyday collaborating lives through the next decade.
Language Barriers Dissipate
Working across language barriers is already easing. This is destined to have a truly transformative effect in diverse regions such as Asia Pacific. Live transcription is becoming more practical, and limited live cross-language translation is beginning to appear. What’s needed is a practical system for this, and the next decade will see continued convergence to an asymptote that merges very high accuracy, low latency (low translation delay), large vocabulary, and compatibility with a wide range of voices, accents, and acoustic environments (if any of these are less than perfect, most systems today degrade rapidly). We’re unlikely to reach perfection in ten years, but we and our solutions will adapt to each other, and become much better at harvesting meaningful value from even moderate accuracy and vocabulary.
