Adobe has announced that they are working on a project to bring voice controlled photo editing to the iPad and other compatible mobile devices.

Adobe has released a video which demonstrates the concept. The video shows the user making a basic crop, flipping the image before sharing it to Facebook. Adobe is referring to the project as Adobe Sensei and for the moment, this looks to be a concept rather than an upcoming addition to their toolset.

Adobe has added the following description to the video:

Our Adobe Research team is exploring what an intelligent digital assistant photo editing might look like. With Adobe Sensei we combined the emerging science of voice interaction with a deep understanding of both creative workflows and the creative aspirations of our customers. Our speech recognition system is able to directly accept natural user voice instructions for image editing either locally through on-device computing or through a cloud-based Natural Language understanding service.  This is a first step towards a robust multimodal voice-based interface which allows our creative customers to search and edit images in an easy and engaging way using Adobe mobile applications.

At the moment, I believe Adobe are only planning this for their mobile applications and the edits that can be performed by voice commands seem to be very limited. However, there is obvious uses and benefits of this technology for people with physical limitations. Plus, as voice recognition software improves, there is nothing to stop the commands becoming more complex and intuitive. Time will tell.

The Problem

Now, while I do understand the logic for the research and development into this, I can’t help but smile. I am Scottish and I have the accent to prove it. Yip, you can see where I’m going with this. Most, if not all voice recognition devices, struggle to understand anyone with a Scottish accent. A fact that is regularly exploited by comedians and well documented.

Conclusion

I am a big fan of research and development that has a practical benefit to photography but I would simply love to see the results of this from Scottish photographers. I foresee a lot of Instagram accounts being created purely for comic effect and ridicule of the software. Beware Adobe!

Discussion

Is it just me? Is it just those of us who speak with a Scottish, or non-American, accents that will struggle with this software?