Speech Technology at CES

The 2005 Consumer Electronics Show is taking place this week in Las Vegas. Besides the traditional crashing demos given by Bill Gates, (this year's feature act was a crashing Xbox console) there was plenty of interesting speech technology to be found. Here are a few of the highlights:

Samsung announced two new mobile phones. The a890 apparently builds a grammar from a list of canned short text messages, which the user can utter using speech. The more interesting device is the p207, which is the first mobile device spkydog is aware of that has an honest-to-goodness embedded speech dictation engine. Based on my experience using dictation engines on PCs with lots of memory and 3GHz hyper-threaded procs, my instinct leads me to believe this feature will have about as much utility as the camera on your mobile phone - i.e. a short-lived novelty when you take the phone out of the box. Nevertheless, its a step in the right direction, and has great potential as the technology continues to mature.

Motorola announced a Bluetooth car kit, which accesses speaker-dependent voice tags stored in a mobile handset, to provide consumers with an intuitive in-vehicle communication experience.

Sensory demonstrated its FluentChip (TM), an "ultra-compact" embedded speech solution.

And of course, for a little fun you don't want to miss reading about the new speech reco and other delightful features in the new "Microsoft AI", that Bill Gates announced in his keynote! ;-)