Speech Technology at CES 2006

There were a number of products utilizing speech technology at the International CES show this week in Las Vegas. While there were no cool demos of the speech technology in Windows Vista during Gate's keynote, he did mention speech recognition in the last couple of minutes of his speech.

Using speech recognition to find and browse your music was one particular interesting theme. At last year's CES, Gracenote and Scansoft (now Nuance) announced a partnership to speech-enable portable music players, home entertainment systems and automobile sound systems. This year Gracenote announced a music recommendation system called Gracenote Discover that helps consumers find and discover music that fit their personal tastes. In addition, Gracenote announced a speech recognition solution called MediaVOCS for hands-free control of your media collection and Playlist Plus for content recognition and auto creation of playlists on portable devices. Read the press release.

VoiceBox demonstrated a speech-enabled XM Satellite radio. Drivers can use the this technology to surf oodles of satellite radio channels hands-free while driving. A video demonstration is available on www.voicebox.com.

Korean mobile phone manufacturer Pantech introduced two DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) phones that among other things, are equipped with an embedded text-to-speech engine that can be used to read SMS messages when the user is situationally (or permanently) impaired.

Magellan's RoadMate 760 GPS Navigation system (see photo above) actually wonethe CES 2006 Innovations Award. The device introduces a number of industry firsts to this category, and addition introduces SayWhere, a fairly sweet sounding female TTS voice that clearly articulates upcoming street names to you.

Let us know if we've missed anything worth noting!