The Web needs a voice - literally, technically, politically

Michael Henretty, Ola Gasidlo, Cathleen Berger This talk will
present ideas for how to tackle three dimensions of the future Web:
voice recognition, web compatibility, and digital inclusion. When
your latest Siri, Alexa or Cortana fail to answer your questions
because they seem to simply not understand your instructions,
that’s probably because you’re not a (white) male with a mainstream
American accent. Voice recognition tools are only as good as their
training data, if the data set doesn’t include all sort of accents,
dialects, and dynamic adaptation, the systems we built on top of it
will never fully reap their potentials. Creating an inclusive, and
freely available database to train speech algorithms comes with its
challenges - but they’re not unsolvable. And once we have that?
That’s when we need to translate and connect these tools to our
everyday web experience, writing code that is accessible,
compatible, and adaptable across whichever platform you use to
access the Web. We can already see a push to create a speech driven
future of the Web, but while this is still a vision for most users,
the technical questions underlying this development are being
addressed now - which is why we need to make sure our answers
contribute to a healthy environment. And once we have the training
data and the standards? That’s when our political contexts will be
yet again put to a test: how can we make sure our societies
continue to grow in an open and inclusive manner? What do we need
to pay attention to, if we don’t want technologies to become our
oppressors? It’s in our hands to use the tools we create to make
sure they give power to the people - because POP culture needs a
voice.