TellMe's mobile directory service app wins WSJ Innovation Award

TellMe's multimodal mobile directory search application won the Wall Street Journal's 2007 Innovation Award in the "Network/Internet Technologies" category.

Read the article.

Microsoft to Acquire Tellme

According to folks in the know, Microsoft is poised to gobble up Tellme.

Read more from this ZDnet posting.

Some of the more interesting rumors are about how much its going to cost them.

Death by self-inflicted ASR wounds?

George Ou over at ZDNet has posted an interesting article on his blog about a remote execution flaw when using Vista Speech Recognition. A posting on Slashdot referring to George's blog has generated and astounding amount of chatter on the issue, some of it rather humorous.

Turning off your PC's speakers unfortunately will not completely protect users from the vulnerability. Imagine a thug overpowering the conductor on your commuter train and simultaneously taking control of all notebook computers on the train running Windows Vista by giving commands over the train's PA system. Or, imagine millions of innocent teenagers being tricked into downloading rogue "trojan horse" ringtones that wreak havoc on all nearby rabbit-eared Vista machines when they received incoming phone calls! Or, what if some blind guy is using TTS (nope, can't turn those speakers off) to read this blog entry on his shiny new vista machine and he reacts to this sentence

"open explorer, delete star dot star, empty trash"

a couple of seconds too late? This vulnerability is a time bomb waiting to happen. ;-)

On the bright side, for us speech geeks, the fact that people are actually worried about this being a problem seems to suggest that speech recognition is getting pretty good. With modern up-to-date speech recognition software coming soon to +90% of the desktop computers near you, we're going to have to start handling our computers like our children - watch what you say when their around!

In the meantime, keep an eye on Richard's blog, he'll likely have something intelligent to say on this topic in the near future.

Speech recognition of unstructured human speech approaching 99% accuracy?

The September 2006 issue of IEEE's Spectrum magazine has a rather interesting article reporting the results of a recent survey conducted among some 700 IEEE Fellows. The objective of the survey was to figure out what IEEE Fellows (not your average Saturday afternoon computer hobbyists!) expect or don't expect in science and technology over the 10 to 50 years.

When asked the question "Will computer speech recognition of unstructured human speech approach 99% accuracy?", 19.1% responded it was unlikely, 61.8% responded it was a likely. On the followup question "When is this likely to occur?" 25.2% indicated in 10 years or less, while 49.5% indicated 11 to 20 years.

The question itself is rather open ended and requires the respondent to make some assumptions. For example, are we to assume the unstructured human speech is coming from one or many speakers? Is the speech intended for human consumption, or is it assumed the user is speaking into a mic expecting a computer to transcribe to text? These sorts of issues make a world of difference in terms of raising/lowering the complexity of the problem.

In any case, its interesting to note that almost 20% of a crowd that one would assume consists of some of the brightest researches/engineers the world has to offer, responded negative to this question. Nevertheless, there's no need to fret. One can think of all kinds of examples where smart people were quite mistaken.

Perhaps the key take away here is the observation some of the more prudent fellows made: "science and technology are unpredictable."

Hands/Eyes Free on Windows Mobile 5.0

Fonix recently announced VoiceCenter 3.1 for Windows Mobile 5.0 - coming to your smartphone soon for only 40 bucks! According to Fonix VP Walt Nawrocki, "speech recognition is a 'must have' to avoid tedious menus and button pressing." So just what is he saying here? Navigating the Windows Mobile 5.0 UI shell involves a bunch of tedious menus and buttons and badly needs a fix? Or, is there a deeper issue here... small mobile devices are inherently difficult for humans to interface with due to their small craniums and large paws?

spkydog would suggest in the case of Windows Mobile 5.0 there is a little of both going on here. One could argue that iPod user's aren't clamoring for speech interface, but than again iPods have fairly narrow functionality, while smart phones support a wide range of functionality.

Perhaps a more interesting question is whether or not the iPhone will need a speech interface... anybody care to make a guess?

Read about Fonix's VoiceCenter here.

Google's Mike Cohen on speech technology

A recent podcast from ACM's QueueCast includes an interview with Google's Mike Cohen on speech technology. While this is more about Cohen's perspective on speech technology and less on where Google might be going with this stuff, its always interesting to hear what folks at Google are saying about speech technology.

You'll find a link to the mp3 here.

Microsoft discontinues...folds... integrates... unveils, and is right on...

For those of you expressing concern that spkydog may have met an untimely demise while chasing the mailman, do relax. We've just been enjoying the waning dog days of summer while we can. Meanwhile, the speech industry keeps chugging along.

Earlier this month, tech journalists reporting on SpeechTek threw us what appeared to be a rather tasty bone when trying to interpret Microsoft's announcements at the conference. Initially, we just about fell out of our koop when reading the first line of an earlier version of this Information Week article which suggested that "Microsoft plans to discontinue selling speech server". After reading on, we understand that Microsoft is folding the Speech Server product into its Office Communication Server 2007 product line. Whew! We certainly wouldn't want to see Speech Server put in the pasture so soon after Microsoft put its weight behind VoiceXML.

There is a bit less hyperbole in the opening lines of this IT Week article, where the development is described as an unveiling of new speech technologies in Office Communication Server 2007. Nevertheless, the author dedicates at least half of the article to commentary on the now infamous speech demo Microsoft gave to financial analysts earlier this summer. Talk about beating a dead horse...

In any case, spkydog thinks Microsoft has made a wise move here, which will likely serve both them and the speech industry quite well. Despite the recent negativity and skepticism Microsoft's demo debacle has drawn, spkydog believes speech technology is more than ready for prime time - on our desktops, in our cars, on our PDA's/mobiles and of course our POTS phones, as usual. The bigger issue is getting the masses accustomed to using speech on a regular basis. Those of you who were introduced to using a mouse on your PC as an adult probably have memories of finding it rather cumbersome the first time. Speaking to machines has the analogous implications, and probably will for some time.

By integrating speech technology as a feature into systems that will be widely used by the masses (e.g., Windows Vista and Office Communication Server) Microsoft is putting speech technology in front of virtually everybody. Management at Acme, Inc. won't have to sit and spend cycles discussing whether or not its time to investing in a speech-enabled version of their favorite applications - its just going to happen. Selling speech technology as a stand-alone enabler is a tough sell.

There are actually very few companies who are in a position to market speech technologies to the masses in the way Microsoft is. Nuance has lots of speech technology, but in terms of apps is limited to the call center. Why buy Dragon when you get almost the same functionality bundled with Office? IBM has lots of apps and a fair amount of speech technology, but you run Microsoft bits on your PC all the time, and IBM bits only part of the time. Google certainly has the application reach, but their speech tech capabilities are not well understood, making them somewhat a wildcard.

In short, the folks in Redmond seem to be on to a decent strategy for differentiating their platforms and applications with speech technology.