13 December 2002

David Isen: SMS-with-voice-input as killer app 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     comments