Startup Totes Speech Recognizer "Second to None"

Is speech technology the sause needed for making search truly ubiquitous? You can look at this from a couple of angles. First, doing search from mobile devices is obviously fairly interesting, especially when you throw location into the mix. However, even with querty keyboards it is rather tedious to enter keywords. Speech recognition is one way to ease this constraint. Another angle to consider is the fact that more and more content being served up these days is not simple text, but audio (i.e. think podcasts!) as well as video. Using speech recognition to index multimedia content is thus another interesting prospect.

We've blogged on the blinkx service in the past. SimonSays Voice Technologies Inc. is a two man startup in Toronto who claims to have speaker independent speech recognition technology that can transcribe audio with 98% accuracy, with of course the rather vague qualifier "under good audio conditions". Its hard to imagine two guys working spare time could generate technology that outperforms the stuff Scansoft/Nuance, Microsoft, and IBM have been investing spending millions on for decades, employing some of the most brilliant speech researchers in the world. Nevertheless, using speech recognition to index multimedia content is indeed an interesting problem to be working on these days, and whomever does crack this nut in a decisive way stands to profit greatly. There's plenty of evidence that the search guys (Google and Yahoo) have been thinking about this as well, but we'll save that for another time.

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