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13 December 2002 |
I smell a winner app. Voice recognition -- the ability to render tens of thousands of spoken words into text -- is coming to a pocket-sized device near you. Instead of thumbing 444-7777-33-66-000-444-7777-33-66-11111-222-666-6, you'll just say, 'isen@isen.com'.
If you try to read all the text messages you'll get while you are driving, you'll crash your car -- unless you have a text-to-speech voice message reader. [...] Message retrieval; a REAL killer app.
Isen is talking about this article on embedded speechrec:
Could dictating short messages be the killer app for embedded speech? Something like a billion short message service (SMS) messages are now sent each day in Europe and Asia. This, despite the fact that 'the interface for messaging on the cellphone is terrible,' says Jordan Cohen, chief technology officer at Voice Signal Technologies (Woburn, Mass.), an embedded speech engine developer.
Dictation on a cellphone may seem like a stretch, but Cohen points out that SMS limits messages to just 160 characters, and the types of messages one might send on a cellphone tend to be limited. Voice Signal hopes to introduce message dictation by year's end, when a universally supported service is set to roll out in the United States.
MIT's Zue, who sits on the Voice Signal board, agrees that speech can be a more convenient interface. "It's natural, it's flexible, it's efficient," he says—but not for every setting. "Even if the system performs flawlessly, do you really want to always be talking to your machine?" Zue says. "With wireless technology, we can sit in a conference room and type to our laptops unobstrusively. But if you start talking to your machine, first of all it's obnoxious, and secondly, there's no privacy."
Voice Signal make embedded speechrec and speech synthesis engines for mobile devices (cf Dan Roth inteviewed by Speechtech here). They've already signed up Nokia for the Series 60 platform. As Cohen notes, the limited 'messagespace' on the sms form factor probably means that providing a dictation service for sms is easier than, say, for email. And if it works well maybe we'll avoid the Smirnoff/poisoned problems of T9's predictive texting.
12:55:37 PM 
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Specific technologies will benefit from advances in sophistication, according to the research. For example, call centers will add speech recognition to existing IVR systems and make greater investment in CTI to integrate new contact types, such as email and web chat. Furthermore, call centers without IVR systems can now buy them from a greater number of vendors, because of the shift from proprietary hardware to open-standards based software needed for the IVR solution. As a result, Datamonitor believes that Customer Interaction Management (CIM) suites will become more popular, which include the complete range of component technologies, such as queuing and routing of calls, CTI, IVR, predictive dialing, multimedia contact management and call recording.
12:52:59 PM
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ET's (rodcorp disclosure) Nik Philpot on the benefits for BT customers: "it gives them immediate access to a range of pre-built applications, a large hosting infrastructure and a price structure significantly more attractive than a traditional CPE solution." CPE = Customer-Premises (-installed) Equipment.
10:33:31 AM
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In the singles world, for instance, 'Google dating' —running prospective beaus through the search engine— is now standard practice. If the facts about a suitor stack up, then you can not only go on the date with confidence, but you know what to talk about.
Oh dear. Googling for rodcorp reveals that we are nerdly^2, and not even in a gnarly t3chnok1d way, and limply trafficed/linked. Also: google fight.
Also also on Google: 2002 year-end Google zeitgeist: Top stories (world cup and Iraq), top brands (Ferrari, Sony and Nokia), top men and women (JLo and Eminem), top athletes (Beckham), top technologies (mp3 and sms), top musicians (2Pac the highest posthumous artist). Compare with 2001's review.
10:17:41 AM
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© Copyright 2003 rodcorp.
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