the spkydog koop

Microsoft to enter the smartphone business?

2009-02-07T03:57:00.001-08:00

Dell, now Microsoft? It seems highly unlikely, but there is some chatter out there.

Palm Pre is looking good

2009-01-13T08:26:00.000-08:00

The Palm Pre is a beautiful thing indeed. Even Walt Mossberg was impressed.

Take a look at phonescoop's review on youtube:

Then, check out the galleries on Palm's site.

Luxurious Verbal Spam?

2009-01-08T06:17:00.001-08:00

Toyota is rolling out a service called Lexus Insider that involves delivering audio messages of up to 3 minutes in length to your Lexus. Its an opt-in service available only on certain models. This could have some potential as a reminder service, but the potential for it to become annoying is very high.

What would be a useful service is one in which user specified audio be automatically aggregated in the cloud and then delivered to the vehicle whenever the user requests it. For example, if your favorite podcasts or music in your itunes library could be delivered to your car without having to flash to your media player and then hook your media player up to the cards audio system, that would actually be useful.

Read the article.

Tutorial - Writing a SOAP web service client in Java in 20 minutes or less

2008-12-29T11:46:00.000-08:00

So you don't know SOAP from WSDL? Whether you're coming from the RESTful school when it comes to building out web services, or you've simply managed to not get involved in web services altogether, here's a really simple tutorial describing how you can access an existing SOAP web service from Java in less than 20 minutes.

Preliminaries

To get started, we'll visit www.xmethods.net and find an interesting public web services that our Java client will attempt to access. For this tutorial, we'll settle on CDYNE's Free Weather Web service. Next we'll assume you have a recent vintage Java SE Developer Kit installed on your machine. Finally, we will also assume you have a recent version of Apache ant installed in your development environment, and that you are familiar building projects using ant.

Installing Apache Axis

You'll need to install a recent copy of Apache Axis. At the time of writing, we're using version 1.4. Axis is the Apache Web Services Project - an open source implementation of W3C SOAP and related specifications. It comes in both a C++ flavor, as well as Java so be sure to download and install the latter. Download the Apache Axis archive and unpack it on your local disk. We'll assume the root directory of your Axis installation is BASEDIR in the discussion that follows.

Generating Java Bindings for the Service

You'll notice that each public web service listed on www.xmethods.net has an associated WSDL description. Simply put, WSDL (pronounced "whiz-del") is an XML language that describes the interfaces of a web service. Since we want our Java client to access the CDYNE Free Weather service, we'll save a copy of its WSDL file to our local disk in a file named Weather.wsdl.

Apache Axis includes a convenient tool called WSDL2Java that lets you automatically generate the necessary Java bindings from a WSDL description. If you've included the jar files included in BASEDIR/lib in your classpath you can run this tool on your WSDL file as follows:

% java org.apache.axis.wsdl.WSDL2Java Weather.wsdl

We can also accomplish this with a simple ant build.xml file:

<project name="axisSamples" default="run-client">

<property name="librarydir" value="C:\axis-1_4\lib"/>

<path id="libraries">
<fileset dir="${librarydir}">
   <include name="*.jar"/>
</fileset>
</path>

<target name="run-wsdl2java">
<java fork="true" dir="src" classname="org.apache.axis.wsdl.WSDL2Java" classpathref="libraries">
   <arg line="../Weather.wsdl"/>
</java>
</target>

Either way, after successfully running the WSDL2Java tool you'll find the generated Java bindings for the services described in the WSDL file in the same directory. The generated classes will be found within a package hierarchy that was generated using the target namespace used within the WDSL file. In our example, the package will be com.cdyne,ws.WeatherWS.

Writing the Java Client

Next, we will write a simple Java client that utilizes the classes we generated from the WSDL file in the previous step. We'll begin by browsing through the generated code. Take a look at WeatherLocator.java. This is the class we'll use to bootstrap our client to get an interface to the Java stub that implements the interface to the remote web service. Looking at the class implementation, you'll notice this method:

   public com.cdyne.ws.WeatherWS.WeatherSoap getWeatherSoap() throws javax.xml.rpc.ServiceException {
  java.net.URL endpoint;
  try {
    endpoint = new java.net.URL(WeatherSoap_address);
  } catch (java.net.MalformedURLException e) {
    throw new javax.xml.rpc.ServiceException(e);
  }
  return getWeatherSoap(endpoint);
}

This method returns an instance that implements the interface com.cdyne.ws.WeatherWS.WeatherSoap. If we take a look at the interface (in WeatherSoap.java) we can see the details of the operations the SOAP weather service makes available:

public interface WeatherSoap extends java.rmi.Remote {

/**
* Gets Information for each WeatherID
*/
public com.cdyne.ws.WeatherWS.WeatherDescription[] getWeatherInformation() throws java.rmi.RemoteException;

/**
* Allows you to get your City Forecast Over the Next 7 Days,
* which is updated hourly. U.S. Only
*/
public com.cdyne.ws.WeatherWS.ForecastReturn getCityForecastByZIP(java.lang.String ZIP) throws java.rmi.RemoteException;

/**
* Allows you to get your City's Weather, which is updated hourly.
* U.S. Only
*/
public com.cdyne.ws.WeatherWS.WeatherReturn getCityWeatherByZIP(java.lang.String ZIP) throws java.rmi.RemoteException;
}

That's essentially all we need to know to write our simple Java client (TestClient.java) that accesses the remote web service:

import com.cdyne.ws.WeatherWS.*;
import java.util.Calendar;

/**
* @author spkydog (http://spkydog.blogspot.com)
*
*/
public class TestClient {

public static void main(String[] args) {

  try {
    Weather wservice = new WeatherLocator();
    WeatherSoap wsrv = wservice.getWeatherSoap();
    ForecastReturn retVal = wsrv.getCityForecastByZIP("49426");

    if (retVal.isSuccess()) {

      System.out.println("The weather forecast for "
        + retVal.getCity() + ", "
        + retVal.getState() +  " is:\n ");

      Forecast[] forecasts = retVal.getForecastResult();
      for(Forecast f : forecasts) {

        Calendar date = f.getDate();
        System.out.println(date.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH)
           + "/" +  date.get(Calendar.YEAR)
           + ": " + f.getDesciption());
      }

    }

  } catch (Exception ex) {
    ex.printStackTrace();
  }
}
}

Notice that WSDL2Java also generates all the various types used as input and output to the methods supported by the web service. In this case, we have a variety of types, of which we use two in the simple client above (ForecastReturn.java and Forecast.java)

Building/Running the Java Client

Once again, assuming that the axis jars are in our classpath, and our client and generated code is all in a sub-directory named src, we can compile our test client by entering the following command at the console:

% javac src/*.java src/com/cdyne/ws/WeatherWS/*.java

We can also build the code by adding a compile task to our build.xml file:

<target name="compile" depends="run-wsdl2java">
<javac srcdir="src">
<classpath>
<path refid="libraries"/>
</classpath>
</javac>
</target>

We can run the client by entering the following command at a commandline console:

% java TestClient

Or, if we haven't bothered to add the axis jar files to our environment's CLASSPATH variable, we can simply invoke the client via ant by adding this task:

<target name="run-client" depends="compile">
<java fork="true" dir="src" classname="TestClient" classpathref="libraries">
<classpath path="src"/>
</java>
</target>

If all worked as planned, the client prints out the weather forecast ranging from yesterday to six days into the future:

The weather forecast for Hudsonville, MI is:

28/2008: Partly Cloudy
29/2008: Mostly Cloudy
30/2008: Mostly Cloudy
31/2007: Partly Cloudy
1/2008: Mostly Cloudy
2/2008: Mostly Cloudy
3/2008: Mostly Cloudy

That's all there is to it! A zip archive with the complete source code and ant build.xml is available for download here.

TellMe's mobile directory service app wins WSJ Innovation Award

2007-09-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-13T07:35:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-02-01T17:37:00.000-08:00

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?

2006-10-04T06:52:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-27T12:56:00.000-07:00

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...

2006-08-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Google to Release n-gram Models

2006-08-03T15:06:00.000-07:00

Today Google announced it will be providing a 6 DVD set of n-gram models it has generated from a training corpus of over one trillion words - culled of course from public websites.

"We believe that the entire research community can benefit from access to such massive amounts of data. It will advance the state of the art, it will focus research in the promising direction of large-scale, data-driven approaches, and it will allow all research groups, no matter how large or small their computing resources, to play together. That's why we decided to share this enormous dataset with everyone. We processed 1,011,582,453,213 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,146,580,664 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,653,070 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times."

Read the complete article.

More VoiceXML-Related Open Source Projects Announced

2006-08-02T06:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Voxeo announced www.rocketsource.org - an open source project involving three off-the-shelf VoiceXML/CCXML applications. It seems at least one of the applications (Voice Conference Manager) already existed as an open source project, but getting Voxeo behind certainly won't hurt. I would suggest the project is appropriately named, considering it's the rocket scientists over at Voxeo who are making it happen. I don't think the sun ever sets in that shop!

Read the press release.

Microsoft's Unfortunate SR Demo Takes First Place on Google Video

2006-08-01T06:04:00.000-07:00

For the past three days a 1 minute 39 second video clip of Microsoft's infamous speech recognition demo has the honors of being #1 on the Google Video Top 100 List. This is rather remarkable given the cacophony of often bizarre clips that it must compete with to earn the distinction. Please help me... is an unfortunate speech demo (alas they happen everyday... though not necessarily in financial analysts meetings) really as popular as Diet Coke & Mentos explosions, and lip syncing Chinese adolescents? Does anybody have any insight into the heuristics Google applies to generate the top 100 video list? One wonders if Google is simply having a little fun of their own at Microsoft's expense?

Watch the video.

Speech Recognition in Nintendo's Brain Age Not So Smart...

2006-07-31T07:38:00.000-07:00

spkydog came across this rather fun review of Nintendo's "Brain Age" game. The author's comments on this hit game are positive for the most part, until he gets onto the speech recognition functionality. spkydog has yet to play the game, but our current theory is that Nintendo might have licensed Vista's speech technology from Microsoft. ;-)

Just kidding on that last point of course! Microsoft's very own Richard Sprague makes a valid point in his posting regarding their recent demo debacle. To paraphase, people typically don't write about the 99 times the SR demo worked flawlessly. It is the failures that seem to be of human interest.

At the same time, unlike Vista, "Brain Age" is a shipping product on the DS. If the SR is really flakey on that platform (not surprising) it would of been better for everybody if they hadn't used the technology in this title to begin with. All it takes is a few high profile products that include less than acceptable speech technology to set up the negative stereotypes for yet another decade. If Microsoft does eventually get the speech technology right in Vista, it will be the most visible deployment of speech technology on the planet, and hopefully will do much in terms of helping the masses feel a bit less "buh-loo" about the readiness of speech technology in general.

Read the Brain Age review.

The Talking iPod?

2006-07-27T15:52:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month an article in the the Scotsman conjectures that a future version of the iPod will be equipped with a text-to-speech engine. They suggest TTS will be used to inform the user of what's playing when situationally impaired (driving, jogging, low light conditions, etc.). Evidently a recent patent filing with the USPO by Apple back in May has triggered this rumor.

Read the article.

Whoops... Microsoft's Speech Demo Bombs

2006-07-27T15:32:00.000-07:00

Evidently Microsoft was trying to convince some financial analysts that speech recognition was ready for prime time, and managed to prove just the opposite! No big deal really, this is classic for anybody who has tried to do a speech demo (or any demo for that matter!) in front of a crowd.

Read more on CNET.

Multimodal BoF at IETF Meeting this week

2006-07-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

A birds-of-a-feather (BoF) session is on the agenda of the 66th IETF Meeting in Montreal this week to discuss a draft charter of a working group to focus on the Distributed Multimodal Synchronization Protocol (DMSP). The protocol aims to coordinate multiple modalities in distributed multimodal systems and is described in an Internet draft submitted to the IETF by Motorola, IBM, and others.

The BoF is scheduled for Thursday, July 13 @ 1PM Eastern. If you're at the IETF meetings this week and interested in speech/multimodal you'll want to attend.

Read the DMSP BoF Agenda

Cool multimodal video in Google's top 100 List

2006-06-29T06:27:00.000-07:00

Here's a fantastic multimodal demo on a table top display in which the user uses a combination of speech and two hand interactions to control Google Earth and Warcraft III. I've seen Bill Gates showing some tabletop interaction scenarios at a keynote (CES??) sometime in the recent past, but this blows it away in terms of being a compelling demo.

The demo is based on the research of Edward Tse, a CS Ph.D. student at the University of Calgary. There is similar work being done at MIT.

You can watch the demo at Google Video.

Yet Another Voice Search Patent

2006-06-14T05:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday V-ENABLE issued a press release announcing a mobile voice search patent granted by the USPO. spkydog hasn't yet had time to peruse the content of the patent, but it isn't clear that this is the first such patent in the mobile space as the press release claims. Google's recent voice search patent teaches a variety of client devices, including PDAs and telephones.

V-ENABLE's press release.

IBM Hires 100+ Speech Researchers?

2006-06-13T07:23:00.000-07:00

In the recent past we've posted and speculated about the fact that Yahoo and Google have hired a number of speech folks over the past year or so. This is the first I've heard about IBM beefing up big time in the speech area, at least in the recent past? Not sure who they might be, though we are aware of some who have left IBM recently. Hmmm...

The success of some of these limited-application voice recognition systems has recently prompted the big software heavyweights, Microsoft and IBM, to make further investments. IBM has hired more than a hundred extra speech technology researchers, with the aim of developing a system capable of matching the human level of speech recognition by 2010. And Bill Gates recently said that "we [Microsoft] aim to have computer systems capable of matching a human level of speech recognition by 2011"

Read the ZDNet article this quote was taken from.

Speech/VoiceXML Merger Mania - Where's Google?

2006-06-12T06:56:00.000-07:00

The Cisco announcement(s) last week add to the growing list of mergers/aquisitions involving vendors who are involved in the speech/VoiceXML industry. Here's the ones I can recall at the moment:

Cisco acquires Metreos and Audium
Genesys (Alcatel) acquires VoiceGenie Technologies
Cantata merges with Excel and Brooktrout which had acquired Snowshore earlier
Voxeo acquires Vocomo
HP acquires PipeBeach
Microsoft acquires Unveil and more recently picked up Vocalocity's VoiceXML technology
Genesys acquires Telera
Scansoft acquires Nuance, and many other firms.

I'm sure I'm missing some here, but absent from the list are Google and Tellme. Perhaps its time to resurrect the rumor of Google acquiring Tellme? :-)

Burger King Uses Speech Recognition to Take Drive-Thru Orders

2006-06-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun one for ya all... after firing their drive thru attendant and attempting to outsource the job of taking burger orders to a call center in India, this Burger King finally decides to give speech recognition a try.

Watch the video.

Prof. Hawking Reads Business Week?

2006-06-05T06:07:00.000-07:00

Here is a rather nice example of how the increasing degree of interactivity on the web makes rather boring redundant content a bit more interesting. In this recent Business Week technology column on speech recognition, the author regurgitates the same technology summary/predictions journalists have been writing for at least a decade now. The reader comments go on to add more interesting content/analysis than the original article itself. For example, if you think the guy in the cube next door who is constantly on a conference call annoys you, just wait until you hear the dull roar in the cubicles that is enabled when speech recognition gets as good as folks are predicting it will! Hopefully by then all of us technologists will be telecommuting!

One of the more interesting comments is supposedly supplied by Prof. Hawking's himself. Not sure if that's the case, but the point made (conventional ASR does a pretty good job of recognizing conventional TTS) is actually something I've confirmed independently. Unlike Hawking's, the typical use case for most of us is to automate testing of speech systems/applications.

Read the article.

MIT's Human Speechome Project

2006-05-30T05:30:00.000-07:00

For those of you speech folks out there with kids, you've likely never ceased to be amazed and inspired by the fact that your 3 year old child's speech recognition capability surpasses the most advanced speech technology available. Researchers at MIT are trying to figure out just how these little tykes get so good with speech. The team will be monitoring all of a child's entire first 3 years with sophisticated video cameras, etc. in an attempt to understand how he acquires its speech skills.

I wonder if the child will have access to the videos later? Imagine watching yourself learn how to say "mama"? I've noticed with my own children that when they watch videos of themselves as infants, they tend not to be able to filter what they actually remember experiences vs. what they saw on video when they were older. For example, my daughter will say "remember the time I was wearing Daddy's sunglasses in my playpen?", when in fact she doesn't remember it at all, she just remembers seeing a video of it later.

In any case, like a lot of the projects at MIT, this is a fascinating study, and it will be interesting to see what it turns up in the years ahead.

Read the article.

Replace People With Monkeys in the Call Center!

2006-05-12T03:41:00.000-07:00

Forget offshoring your call centers to India. Just hire a bunch of rhesus monkeys! Well not quite, but Harvard psychologists have inferred from their rather interesting experiments that rhesus monkeys can indeed discern between spoken Dutch and Japanese, though they obviously cannot extract the semantics of what's being said.

Spkydog of course is a bit more evolved than monkeys. He has gotten fairly good at extracting the semantics from human speech... "nice doggy" means wag your tail because you're about to get a treat, "bad dog" and various utterances not worthy of print means duck because you're about to get beaned with a shoe!

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/05.04/09-infer.html

Your email read by a stuffed bunny?

2006-05-08T09:53:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun project called ubi.ach I stumbled upon that involves a stuffed bunny using TTS to read your email to you wirelessly.

http://itp.nyu.edu/show/detail.php?project_id=742

Microsoft Speech Server 2007 Beta Launched Today

2006-05-08T07:30:00.000-07:00

Get your copy of Microsoft Speech Server 2007 beta!

http://www.microsoft.com/speech/default.mspx

In case you haven't left your cave in a while, the big news regarding this beta is VoiceXML support. Speech Server 2007 is supposed to ship this fall.

Nokia Phones Go to Natural Language Class

2006-05-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

The last line of this article is rather interesting.

"Ideally, says Katz, MobileStart will be combined with voice-to-text software to make using cell phones even easier. Indeed, Nokia's Iannucci points to an irony: "cell phones are inherently voice devices, but they don't use voice as a modality."

Evidently, the challenging part of the problem is going to be left as homework? ;-)

Read the Technology Review article.

Comparison of Dragon Naturally Speaking and Microsoft

2006-04-27T06:15:00.000-07:00

I just came across this recently published comparison of Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 and the dictation engine Microsoft ships with Office 2003. This is one of the most indepth comparisions of these products I've seen, and if you are about to spend a significant amount of effort training and using one of these products you'll want to read through this and understand the tradeoffs.

The main take away here seems to be DNS8 offers better accuracy than Microsoft, but also requires a LOT more CPU. The author also points out that both products do not seem to perform any better/worse on dual core machines. This sort of suggests that if you've already bought Office and are running on a low end or older PC, you might want to just use Microsoft's engine. On the other hand if your PC has ample MIPs available and you have $$ burning holes in your pockets, go and buy a copy of DNS8.

The author's findings do gel with my own personal experiences in the recent past, when my right arm was in a cast for 6 weeks. I started out with the Microsoft dictation engine and after a couple of weeks I switched over to DNS. My main motivation for switching to DNS was not recognition accuracy, but the fact that they also offered a speech interface to the over all windows desktop, which let me use the computer with minimal need to try using the mouse with my left hand. Once I got DNS trained and running, I felt it offered more accurate dictation as well, though I didn't try to objectively quantify performance as this article does.

Another thing to consider is that with Windows Vista reportedly supporting speech as a seamless platform feature vs. an afterthought, its quite likely purchasing DNS at this point could be a waste of $$. I would expect the speech engine(s) in Vista as well as how they are integrated into the desktop and applications will be significantly better than what we've seen in the past.

Read the article.

Chatter on Microsoft's Adoption of VoiceXML

2006-04-14T08:14:00.000-07:00

There is a fair amount of commentary in the blogosphere and industry rags on Microsoft's recent embrace of VoiceXML. For example, Voxeo's Clegg Ivey views it as a confirmation of VoiceXML as THE industry standard: "When Microsoft signs on to a standard you know you're in good shape". Others are busy speculating how it finally came about, such as Robert's recent posting on Wombat Nation where he theorizes it was the Unveil aquisition last fall that brought Microsoft into the VoiceXML camp.

What makes this development particularly interesting of course is Microsoft's rigorous and logic defying attempt to squash VoiceXML in the not so distant past, with its controversial announcement of SALT. For example, recall the infamous quote X.D. Huang made: "VXML is just not technically good enough and it doesn't matter what you do. You can beat a dead horse for a long time but no matter how you beat it is still dead." It will be interesting to read Huang's interview with the InfoWorld editor next month when the Speech Server 2007 beta is released. Surely he knows by now that the only thing worse then betting on the wrong horse is betting on a dead horse! ;-)

Google's Voice Search Patent

2006-04-13T06:49:00.000-07:00

Though perhaps eclipsed by the launch of Google's Calendar service, readers of this blog might want to check out this interesting voice search patent issued to Google this past Tuesday by the US Patent Office. Slashdot had a posting on this earlier this week with a fair amount of rather interesting/entertaining commentary.

Alcatel's Genesys Gobbles up VoiceGenie

2006-04-07T06:20:00.000-07:00

In all the excitement this week of Microsoft finally throwing in the towel by finally getting on the VoiceXML bandwagon, you might have missed this other fairly significant development: Genesys' acquisition of Toronto-based VoiceGenie. VoiceGenie is one of the early VoiceXML pioneers. In addition to their excellent technology offerings, the VoiceGenie team has also played an active leadership role in standards and the VoiceXML forum.

Read the VoiceGenie article.

Microsoft Adopts VoiceXML!

2006-04-05T07:05:00.000-07:00

This is not a tardy April Fools joke! The inevitable has happened - Microsoft finally embraces VoiceXML by licensing Vocalocity's VoiceXML technology for their Speech Server product. We've scratched our heads for a long time wondering why Microsoft hasn't supported VoiceXML in its Speech Server product, and its good to see it finally happen. Microsoft's joining of the VoiceXML Forum as a Promoter member is frosting on the cake.

Ironically, the very first posting in this blog (December 2004) was a tongue in cheek posting on this same topic.

Read the press release.

Voxeo: A Tough Act to Beat!

2006-04-03T15:52:00.000-07:00

Hats off yet again to the talented folks at Voxeo! Anybody who took the time to download their recently announced Prophecy beta was certain to be impressed. As we described in a earlier posting on this topic, the Voxeo offering is the industry's first complete (ASR & TTS included) freely downloadable VoiceXML platform. Now Voxeo has bragging rights to another first in that they are the first and ONLY vendor to pass 100% of all the VoiceXML Forum's formal platform certification tests!

For those of you who are not familiar with the Forum's certification test, this might sound somewhat odd, in that you'd expect any certified VoiceXML platform (and there are many!) to pass all the conformance tests. The fact is however, that there are a fair number of optional tests in the suite that are not required for formal certification. The guys at Voxeo are sort of like the precocious geek you remember from elementary school that did all the math problems in the text book the first week of school so he could work on the interesting stuff the rest of the year when everybody else was still trying to figure out the homework assignment. :-)

Read the article.

IVR Market To Hit $1.49 Billion By 2012?

2006-03-27T06:19:00.000-08:00

Frost and Sullivan predict the IVR Market will grow to $1.49 billion by 2012. The IVR market last year was around $565 million in 2005. They indicate that speech technology has provided the most recent growth, but suggest large scale adoption of speech is still hindered by lack of technological maturity and cost.

Read the article.

IETF Mailing List Established for Multimodal Sync Protocol

2006-03-15T06:58:00.000-08:00

An IETF mailing list has been established to discuss the Distributed Multimodal Synchronization (DMSP) Internet Draft. You can sign up for the list at:

https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dmsp

The DMSP Internet Draft is available at:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-engelsma-dmsp-01.txt

The specification describes a protocol for synchronizing the visual view of a web browser or application running on a client (such as a mobile phone) with the voice view of a remote VoiceXML browser running on behalf of the client in the network.

Interesting VoiceXML Articles in Recent Issue of VoiceXML Review

2006-03-14T12:42:00.000-08:00

The March/April issue of the VoiceXML Forum's VoiceXML Review has a couple of interesting articles worth taking a look at. Dave Burke and Scott McGlashan describe how VoiceXML can be used for video services (IVVR: Interactive Voice and Video Response.)

We recently posted on the X+V content Jim Larson had hosted on his site. Well, this month he has a detailed article in the Forum's e-zine describing his experiences with Opera's X+V implementation in a classroom setting. Looks like Opera still doesn't support the W3C SRGS and SSML specifications.... ARRGG!

Speech Recognition Remains one of Bill Gate's Hot Buttons

2006-03-10T05:41:00.000-08:00

In an interview with Time published yesterday, Bill Gates was questioned about Microsoft's ability innovate. In his response to the question, Gates specifically mentions speech recognition, among other things.

Microsoft has pumped a lot of $$ into speech technology R&D, there is no question about it. Whether or not Microsoft benefits from this ongoing R&D investment in a big way is not exactly clear, but there is no question that the speech industry at large benefits substantially. Microsoft's investment and evangelizing speech technology serves to acquaint more and more people with the technology which helps establish and nurture growing market.

Consider for instance, the impact of bundling speech technology into Vista. Regardless of what you think of Microsoft speech technology, this will be a significant development. Basically within 3-4 years 90% of the desktop PC's will likely be speech-enabled with adequate speech recognition and synthesis technologies as a platform feature, NOT an optional add-on package. Sure, you get Microsoft's speech technology when you install Office 2003, but not everybody has Office, or even if they do user's don't necessarily have that component installed or configured. With Vista, the speech technology will simply be there to take advantage of. Developers targetting applications for Windows Vista will be more inclined to utilize the technology, since 1) they can depend on it being there and 2) they can assume people are more familiar with it and more likely to utilize it.

The bottom line is that in the near future, consumers will not just be encountering speech technology via IVR applications when they call their bank, but speech technology will be intimately integrated into their everyday experiences as they interact with their computers and mobile phones. Speech interfaces will no longer be a novelty that quickly become annoying (and abandoned) but a fundamental ingredient in the human-machine interface.

Read the Gates Interview with Time.

Skype Voice Services Are Here!

2006-03-03T06:21:00.000-08:00

There are a number of Skype Voice Services now available to skype users. Most of them involve a per minute fee, but a few demos are free. For example, you can dial the VoxPlorer Receptionist demo by calling +99000745745140. When prompted to say department, speak "New-York transit travel information".

You can browse a list of skype voice services that are currently available at:

http://share.skype.com/directory/voice_services_?c36/

Skype Voice Services are built upon the VoiceXML platforms offered by Tellme, Voxeo, and VoxPilot. Its not entirely clear which application is hosted by which platform, but I guess it doesn't matter from the end user perspective. :-)

I tried these out using skype from my PC and recognition works great. Seems to work just as well for me as the typical POTS call to a tellme-like service.

Nuance Accuses TellMe of Patent Infringement

2006-02-28T07:25:00.000-08:00

Nuance and Phonetic Systems Ltd say that Tellme is infringing on their patents. The claims of the patents cover features of directory assistance and call center apps that include “whisper” technologies and advanced database query techniques.

Read the article.

Speech Recognition-based Podcast Search

2006-02-10T10:18:00.000-08:00

PodZinger has recently launched its podcast search engine. The search index is actually created by running podcast audio content through a speech recognizer. What is really powerful is how they display the search results. In addition to getting links to the podcast's rss feed, you get a list of time marks within the podcast marking where the term was used!

So for example, when I search with the term "speech recognition" and sort by relevancy, an NPR program from October 2005 discussing speech recognition technology shows up, with 50+ additional podcasts that recently used the term speech recognition. If I click on one of the time marks, the player (applet embedded in the html page) begins playing within the segment where speech recognition is discussed.

If you listen to podcasts and are interested in finding out who's saying what about specific topics, this is a very handy tool.

Read the article.

The Voice-Activated Grocery List

2006-02-09T06:06:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting announcement from SmartShopper, Inc. on a dedicated device that serves as your voice-activated grocery list:

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060209/20060209005019.html?.v=1

The device utilizes Nuance's VoCon 3200 embedded speech recognizer and allows you to utter items you need to pick up on your next grocery run. The device is also equipped with a thermal printer so you can print yourself a hard copy.

This is an interesting gadget, but why would anybody want to lug around an extra gadget when all the functionality you need to implement the same thing is available on a mid to high tier conventional mobile phone? For example, my mobile phone (~ $299 retail) is equipped with programmable speech technology that can easily and accurately recognize 2000+ grocery items. It also is equipped with a programmable bluetooth radio (JSR 82) which would make it pretty easy to connect to my $200 bluetooth-equipped HP Photosmart printer.

My mobile phone is also a network device, so if I wanted to quickly browse a few product reviews on that expensive bottle of wine I'm about to purchase while standing in the beverage isle, that can be accomplished without difficulty.

In addition to using bluetooth to interface with my printer it could be used to register which area of the store I'm in and automatically display items on my list that are in that area. For example, when I enter the baked goods/deli section the fresh bread and honey-baked sliced ham entries are displayed.

X+V Applications Galore

2006-02-06T07:56:00.000-08:00

Last month we playfully took IBM's Igor Jablokov to task on the lack of X+V applications on the web that utilize the X+V capabilities of the Opera 8.0. Igor promptly supplied URLs to three X+V apps that you can try out for yourself. I quote from his comments:

Looking for a romantic restaurant to take your significant other? Ask for it at:

http://pvc002.austin.ibm.com/findit3/

Travelling on a quick day trip to Seattle and needing to know if you should bring an umbrella Try:

http://pvc002.austin.ibm.com/weatherit

Leaving the office in Atlanta and wanting to know which route to take? Better check with:

http://pvc002.austin.ibm.com/traffic

Since then, VoiceXML aficionado Jim Larson (of W3C fame) has posted over a dozen example X+V applications for X+V, authored by Jim's pupils at at Portland State University. While these are not polished commercial apps, let's not forget that if anybody can take an emerging technology and do something cool with it, its college kids. Be sure to get Opera 8 installed and try these applications out. Don't forget to provide Jim and Igor your feedback!

World's Coolest Free Desktop VoiceXML Dev. Tooling (Voxeo Does it Again!!)

2006-01-26T12:41:00.000-08:00

Once again spkydog assures you that those guys at Voxeo are seriously on the cutting edge! If authoring VoiceXML content is your bread and butter, this is likely the announcement you've been waiting years for... Voxeo just made a sneak preview of their new beta Prophecy 2006 tools, available for free download.

So what's Prophecy 2006? Well, free online VoiceXML development studios such as Tellme, Voxeo, etc., have been around for quite a while and thousands of developers depend on them. This meat and potatoes kind of stuff for VoiceXML developers, necessary but not real exciting. There is a good reason this hosting model for VoiceXML emerged in the industry. Speech resources and telephony interfaces (hardware and software) are typically costly and complex to install, configure, maintain, etc. So most developers simply let smart guys like those at Voxeo and Tellme take care of the gory details and simply sit at their desks and hack up web apps that serve up VoiceXML markup, and use their softphones (or toll free calls over PSTN) to test their apps hosted on one of these online developer studios. This was actually key motivation behind VoiceXML to begin with, i.e. make IVR apps as portable and easy to develop as web apps.

So getting back to Prophecy 2006, what tons of developers have been looking for for is a simple free download that lets them get a 1-2 port VoiceXML server up and running on their desktop without any special telephony hardware, and no need to buy speech ports from Nuance at thousands of dollars a pop. Some years ago, Motorola released the first such free tool kit (MADK) but it only supported a VoiceXML predecesser VoxML (and maybe an early flavor of VoiceXML) and had a rather flakey interface based on the Microsoft Agent technology. Since then, similar tools have appeared, but they are either very expensive, or very limited (no real speech resources, just simulated textual input/output).

Voxeo's Prophecy platform is what you've been waiting for - a complete fully functional 2 port VoiceXML platform and softphone running on your desktop - all available for free download. If you need more ports, Voxeo indicates they will have very low cost turnkey solutions available.

The Prophecy beta comes in two flavors, with a TTS engine (and a very sweet sounding one at that!) or without. I tried the "without" version first but seemed to have problems getting it going with the MSFT SAPI TTS engine. I then grabbed the "TTS included" version and less than 3 minutes after the download completed (not bad, 300MB or so) I was happily talking to my very own VoiceXML interpreter. It worked like a charm, right out of the box. This is actually the key point here. With Prophecy, Voxeo has substantially lowered the bar when it comes to running your own local VoiceXML platform, from both the technical and economic perspective. The closest you could of gotten to this in the past is to either buy a turnkey system (not cheap) or try to assemble your own from the various open source components that are available (Open VXI, etc.) This is truly an industry first, and one that will without doubt stir up a lot of interest among the VoiceXML developer community.

In addition to the 100% conforming VoiceXML interpreter (the legendary Motorola VoxGateway), Prophecy includes support for CCXML and an app server with PSP, JSP and servlets. And, it probably goes without saying, Voxeo will be more than happy to host those cool apps you develop with Prophecy when the masses start to dial in, or sell you a nice say to use turnkey solution for your enterprise.

Don't look any further, download your copy now: http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy2006/, and spread the word!

IBM's "Superhuman" Speech Initiative

2006-01-25T10:17:00.000-08:00

A 3 year old child is typically a better speech recognizer than the most powerful computer(s) running the most advanced speech algorithms. IBM is striving to change that though. A PC Magazine article published today quotes IBM's David Nahamoo saying IBM's goal is to achieve ASR performance to the level of human beings within the next 5 years.

These sorts of goals have been made before, and billions of dollars spent since, but it has yet to happen. Skepticism aside, conventional speech recognition performance today is pretty decent (thanks to cheap memory and fast processors) when the vocabulary is restricted to a particular domain or context.

IBM's "Tales" project, also described in the article involves an area we described as "hot" in a recent post - automatically recognizing human to human speech. A good solution to this particular problem could be quite useful in building searchable indexes of the reams of audio/video content that is produced. The IBM system can currently process television audio with 60-70% accuracy, but not in real-time. It takes around 4 minutes to deliver results at this level, and performance as high as 80% could be achieved with more processing (i.e. higher delay)

(Note: IBM's Les Wilson in the photo.)

W3C Voice Browser Working Group Publishes SCXML Draft

2006-01-24T09:38:00.000-08:00

Here's a copy of the announcement Jim Larson emailed out this morning:

W3C releases working draft of State Chart XML (SCXML)

This working draft document describes State Chart XML (SCXML), is a general-purpose event-based state machine language that can be used in many ways, including:

As a higher-level dialog language controlling VoiceXML 3.0's encapsulated speech modules (voice form, voice picklist, etc.)
As a voice application metalanguage, where in addition to VoiceXML 3.0 functionality, it may also control database access and business logic modules.
As a multimodal control language in the MultiModal Interaction framework [W3C MMI], combining VoiceXML 3.0 dialogs with dialogs in other modalities including keyboard and mouse, ink, vision, haptics, etc. It may also control combined modalities such as lipreading (combined speech recognition and vision) speech input with keyboard as fallback, and multiple keyboards for multi-user editing.
As the state machine framework for a future version of CCXML.
As an extended call center managment language, combining CCXML call control functionality with computer-telephony integration for call centers that integrate telephone calls with computer screen pops, as well as other types of message exchange such as chats, instant messaging, etc.
As a general process control language in other contexts not involving speech processing.

You can review SCXML at http://www.w3.org/TR/scxml/ Comments for this specification are welcomed to www-voice@w3.org (archives).

Bluetooth Headset Optimized for Speech Recognition

2006-01-23T06:32:00.000-08:00

If you've grown frustrated with speech recognition performance using your bluetooth headset, you might want to take a look at VXI Corporation's recently announced BlueParrott TalkPro headset. This product equipped with a quality noise canceling microphone are supposed to deliver consistence performance, though I have to first hand experience with the product myself. The price tag is a bit higher than what most of us are likely to pay for a bluetooth headset though. My $50/Motorola bluetooth headset works fine, with acceptable recognition performance... at least for the phone's embedded speaker dependent recognizer.

If anybody has any first hand experience with the BlueParrott product, please let us know what you think.

Speech Technology at CES 2006

2006-01-06T07:31:00.000-08:00

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!

Google caught up voice services lawsuit

2006-01-04T10:03:00.000-08:00

Rates Technology Inc has filed suit against Google for infringing on its VoIP patents. Damages from the suite could reach as high as $5B depending on how long litigation takes and how well the VoIP market does during that time.

Chicago patent attorney, Peter Zura has posted an interesting analysis of the actual IP claims of the patents in question. Some interesting background on RTI is revealed in an April 2005 posting by TMC's Rich Tehrani.

In short, this sort of smells like another classic IP case involving a company that provides no apparent value add to society in terms of goods and services, but rather, causes those that do add value to spend (or forfeit) inordinate amounts of resources protecting the businesses they have created.

Read the news article.

Opera Mini to Include Google Search

2006-01-03T11:41:00.000-08:00

Though Opera denies the rumors floating about that it is about to be acquired by Google (or is it Microsoft?), they have recently announced that they will be including Google search in Opera Mini. Google will also become the default search engine for Opera Mobile, the smartphone version of the Opera browser.

Opera Mini is essentially a free J2ME client that relies on a server in the network to preprocess webpages for rendering on small mobile screens. Its sort of an alternative to Opera Mobile that is less of a bandwidth and resource hog, and in theory should run on a large number of J2ME handsets already in use.

Read the article.

X+V demo on ABC News

2006-01-03T07:03:00.000-08:00

IBM's Igor Jablokov recently demonstrated an X+V-enabled mobile phone on ABC News. Fabulous interview Igor! Congrats.

Watch the demo.

Hacking/Skinning Your Furby

2005-12-22T08:22:00.000-08:00

Tuesday I posted on FURBY speech technology. eecue followed up with a link to his blog detailing (with photos) his experience of actually skinning a new FURBY. This was to good to pass up, you have to check out eecue's posting.

Hey eecue, if you or anybody else figures out away to modify your FURBY's speech grammars, please let us know! Imagine customizing your FURBY linguistic capabilities with your own flavor of Furbish.... :-)

Another idea... integrate a Bluetooth radio and setup a J2ME client on your mobile phone so you can send any arbitary English text to the FURBY's onboard TTS engine? So why hasn't Hasbro already thought of this... imagine the fun you could have speaking via your FURBY!

Anybody have any additional zany FURBY application ideas?

Furbish (and English) Speaking FURBYs!

2005-12-20T07:42:00.000-08:00

You may recall Hasbro's hit toy some years back - the FURBY. You might have also heard the FURBY is back this year. The modern FURBY is outfitted with what HASBRO is calling EMOTO-TRONICs technology. This combination of robotic and speech technology makes the FURBY a lifelike and intelligent toy.

The tagline on Hasbro's FURBY website reads "The new FURBY can speak HUNDREDS of words and understand DOZENS of phrases and commands!" The FURBY is actually a bilingual critter in that it understands both its native language (Furbish) as well as some English. (Versions for German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and Italian are also available.)

While the Hasbro site offers little detail on the Furbish vernacular (besides an interactive demo), don't worry, there are plenty of FURBY fans filling the void. One site in particular offers indepth documentation (and analysis) of Furbish, as well as English-to-Furbish and Furbish-to-English online dictionaries.

The FURBY's motor and linguistic brains are actually powered by Sensory, Inc.'s cutting edge RSC-4128 IC. This single chip provides the FURBY's multilingual speech recognition/synthesis as well as coordinated and complex motor controls, all at a very low price tag. (Furby's retail less than $40 USD.)

What you probably were not aware of is the fact that FURBY toys were once banned from the NSA (National Security Agency) in Maryland, because it was said they could "learn." Evidently inability to learn is one of the prequisites for a job with the NSA. ;-)

Dah doo-ay wah!! (Furbish for "big fun yeah!")

Google About to Buy A Ticket to the Mobile Web?

2005-12-15T13:42:00.000-08:00

Saw a posting on Slashdot today reporting rumors circulated by other bloggers (presumably in the know...) that Google is poised to gobble up Opera Software. Given Opera's reach on mobile devices, if this rumor proves true it could provide Google a convenient vehicle for gaining a toe-hold on the mobile web. It could also give XHTML+Voice some interesting momentum, as speech-enabling mobile XHTML browsers makes a lot of sense, given the usability constraints. Particularly when trying to fill out a form via a phone keypad. Another interesting angle though is that most of the text entry you do for existing Google apps (think search, gmail, etc.) would typically require some sort of dictation engine, not grammar-based recognition.

SALTforum.org finally gets updated, but still no traffic!

2005-12-14T06:12:00.000-08:00

You probably didn't notice it, but the SALTforum.org website finally got updated. Nevertheless, nobody seems to care. (In case you don't remember SALT="Speech Application Language Tags", a markup language Microsoft introduced as an alternative to VoiceXML, but essentially never went anywhere.) The update is a slide deck of a SALT Tutorial given earlier this year at SpeechTEK West. As far as we know this is the first update spkydog has observed since June 2003.

Taking a look at Amazon's alexa.com traffic stats makes for a fairly interesting exercise. Among the Alexa Toolbar Community, SALTforum.org ranks 2,710,256, while the VoiceXML Forum's website (voicexml.org) ranks 328,060. In terms of page views, voicexml.org is attracting several hundred thousand views daily, with spikes exceeding 1 million when newsworthy events occur. There is not enough traffic on SALTforum to even get it on the charts.

Another interesting statistic is that tirst in the SALTforum's "people who visit this site also visit" list is voicexml.org. No trace of the SALT Forum in the voicexml.org statistics.

Just for kicks, I took a look at Alexa's traffic stats for bluetooth.org and compared to voicexml.org. I would think that Alexa.com toolbar users are your typical consumer and since bluetooth is a fairly popular consumer technology these days (does anybody still have a mobile phone without bluetooth?) it would enjoy a fair amount of traffic. Surprisingly, bluetooth.org currently ranks 1,100,715, somewhere in between voicexml.org and saltforum.org. This is surprising because VoiceXML today is primarily installed out of sight in machine rooms (Opera 8's X+V support is one notable exception of course!) and you would think the greater awareness of Bluetooth among consumers would naturally translate into more traffic on a Bluetooth technology site.

Of course, these statistics represent the Alexa user community interests, which may or may not be representative of the wider web audience. If there is a correlation with the wider audience (seems reasonable), then I suppose the SALTforum.org vs. voicexml.org data seems to suggest that SALT is indeed a dead horse. I'm not sure what to make of the voicexml.org vs. bluetooth.org comparison. It seems to sort of suggest that VoiceXML has fairly significant momentum in the industry.

Any thoughts?

Speech Recognition Frustrated by Increasing Noise Levels in Hospitals

2005-12-13T06:45:00.000-08:00

A recent study from John Hopkins University reports that noise levels in hospitals has steadily increased over the past five years. A great deal of the noise is in the same frequency range of human speech. The study found that not only does the increase noise slow patient healing rates and contribute to staff stress levels, but it also frustrates attempts to introduce speech recognition technology.

Read the article.

Human to Human Speech Recognition: The Next Frontier

2005-12-06T06:05:00.000-08:00

Not so long ago, Mari Ostendorf, noted speech researcher and Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington articulated a rather interesting observation:

"If you think of the amount of time you spend talking as opposed to reading
documents, you'll realize that you spend much more time talking," Ostendorf
said. "We have this speech data that is a huge potential information source, and
it's largely untapped. It really is the next generation data source."

Ostendorf went on to explain that automated speech recognition works quite well today when human speak to computers, but points out that recognizing human to human speech is an entirely different ball game.

"When people talk to one another, they speed up, they slow down, they get
excited, they get bored, they show emotion, the pitch goes up, the pitch goes
down, there are interruptions, the speech overlaps, the speaker changes -- there
is a lot of variability," she said. There are "ums" and "ahs," repetition and
hesitation. It's not just a matter of what we say, but how we say it. "We don't
notice these disfluencies -- they just pass us by; we filter them out,"
Ostendorf said. "But they are there. And a computer has to do something with
them."

We tend to think of speech recognition technology as a user interface enabler. However, if we look at the amount of audio now available on the Internet (think podcasts, radio/tv programming, etc.) it seems that speech recognition will play an increasingly important role in indexing and searching the vast amounts of audio and video content being served on the web.

Services such as www.blinkx.tv are industry pioneers in this area. Google's recent poaching of widely known speech technologists and executives (K.F Lee - Microsoft, Mike Cohen - Nuance co-founder, TV Raman - IBM, Bill Byrne - SAP) is also interesting. Same thing can be observed of Yahoo.

The IVR Cheat Sheet

2005-11-22T06:46:00.000-08:00

Today's Wall Street Journal had a brief article about Paul English's IVR Cheat Sheet. The IVR Cheat Sheet is a list of phone numbers and tips on how to bypass the IVR applications of numerous well known companies and speak with a human call attendent.

There is some interesting usability data in this list. For example, according to the data being reported in the industry rags, the use of speech recognition greatly increases the odds of not needing to get a human call agent involved in the call when compared to traditional IVR apps using DTMF. Out of the 111 companies in the list, the tips associated with 17 of them involve speech recognition.

The list also could serve as a case study in a human factors text book. Here are some of the more interesting (and entertaining) antipatterns. These examples range from navigating poorly designed call flows, to applying some rather clever social engineering.

Ikea 800 434-IKEA "0000000 (hit ""0"" many times fast, if you do it once, or too slow, it will merely repeat the menu)"

Sears 800-4-MY-HOME Silence don't push numbers just sit there and you will be placed at front of queue.

USPS 800-275-8777 7-3-2 or send them some junk mail

SBC 800-585-7928 Again, an (intelligent, this time) IVR wants YOUR phone number first.

Verizon DSL 800 567 6789 "Say ""I don't know it"" then ""technician"""

Cingular 800-331-0500 For faster service, the option that you are looking to close your account, You get the same ppl but an immediate answer

As consumers become more savvy with regard to this sort of information (I've come across this list several times in the past few months, prior to reading about it in the Journal this morning) another interesting exercise would be to identify which applications do not make it to this list and others similar to it? Presumably, such applications are so easy to use that callers accomplish what they set out to do with no need to talk to a live call attendent. For example, how many of the apps appearing in this list are TellMe clients? I have a hunch, the answer is very few.

Multimodal-Enabling the Web: The Secret Sauce...

2005-11-16T15:26:00.000-08:00

IBM's Igor Jablokov came close to hitting the bullseye in his response to a "what's the secret sauce?" question in an interview on IBM's work in multimodal-enabling the web. Igor replied that: "everything is ready". That is, there is a great markup for visual markup (XHTML) and a great markup for voice (VoiceXML) and the glue needed to tie them together (XML Events).

Igor's not talking about vaporware here of course, as the Windows version of Opera 8 does in fact support XHTML+Voice, thanks to IBM's enablers. So we've got Opera 8 installed and are brimming with enthusiasm. The question for Igor is, can you post the URL to the X+V "where's the nearest starbucks?" app so we all can try it out?

That's always the tough question - how do you attract a critical mass of web content developers to cool stuff like this? Whomever has the right answer to that question has the recipe for the secret sauce.

Read the the whole interview.

Talking Printers?

2005-11-15T06:53:00.000-08:00

Well, not exactly. While Epson did recently announce this multilingual text-to-speech synthesis chip, its intended for applications such as mobile devices, accessibility devices, toys, etc. Embedded TTS actually has a fair amount of utility on portable devices, where situational impairments often constrain the user's ability to squint at tiny screen. Its also easier to implement than ASR on a resource constrained platform.

Talk to your Mac!

2005-11-14T06:48:00.000-08:00

We recently posted about the rather seamless integration of speech recognition into Microsoft's Vista. While spkydog is not himself a Mac hack, for the sake of even and balanced reporting its worthwhile noting that Apple's OS X also has speech recognition capabilities.

While we don't have any direct experience with speech reco on OS X, it does look like like it takes a bit of manual labor to get going, which is rather uncharacteristic for anything Apple! Perhaps some of you who are regular Mac users can let us know how well it works?

Read the OS X tip.

Startup Totes Speech Recognizer "Second to None"

2005-11-11T06:05:00.000-08:00

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.

Read the article.

POTS Death Rattle: The Dinosaurs Strike Back!

2005-11-07T06:35:00.000-08:00

If it isn't the Chinese government, the EU, and others of their ilk trying to wrest away the Internet from the hands of the USA and into the rather incompetent hands of the United Nations (its getting hard for the commies to block those Google cache links ya know... ) its entities such as the Saudi state-owned telecom dinosaur trying to frustrate users of Skype and other discount VoIP services.

The IEEE Spectrum magazine recently ran an interesting article about the technology of a California company by the name of Narus, Inc. that operators can use to scan packets and identify VoIP sessions and block or otherwise frustrate the users, with the goal of course of to use the operators legacy circuit based services or VoIP services that will inevitably be light years behind the services offered by Skype, Vonage and other VoIP pioneers.

Actually its not just telecoms in mideast countries that are trying to frantically strike back against the rising tide of successful VoIP service providers, who threaten to eat their lunch. According to the article, Vodafone has announced plans to block VoIP traffic in Germany. While there appears to be no evidence they are doing so, broadband providers in the USA can legally block VoIP traffic as well.

Read the IEEE Spectrum article.

Review of Microsoft Speech Team's PDC Presentation

2005-11-03T06:40:00.000-08:00

Microsoft Speech bloggers have posted links to their speech team's recent PDC presentations. If you're interested in keeping a pulse on what Microsoft is up to in the speech area, its worthwhile to view this material, kindly made available online for everbody's benefit. In particular you'll gain insight into how speech integrates into Vista and WinFx.

In general, Microsoft is doing a reasonably good job at incorporating speech technology into the Vista desktop. There is no doubt this will help push speech technology into the mainstream, as the initial speaker claimed.

The Speech Server presentation though was a real sleeper. Not only were the demos rather poorly executed, the technology itself is stuff most of us in this field were building and shipping in speech server products in the late 90s. Its amazing that a company of Microsoft's calibre would have people on stage giving prototype demos of use case scenarios that their competitors in the speech server industry were shipping as products 6+ years ago, not to mention the fact that the technology is long past early adopter stage and well entrenched in the form of mature W3C standards, not to mention market share. In 1 hour 21 minutes of talking about speech technology, if I'm not mistaken, not once did the "V" word get mentioned. Come to think of it, I'm not recalling any mention of the "S" word (as in SALT) either, but than again, its likely if they did say it, the naughty word filter on my XHTML+Voice browser would have beeped it out. ;-)

Robert Brown summarized 3 take-aways at the end of the presentation:

1. Windows Vista is a great speech platform.
2. WinFx has a very powerful speech API built into it.
3. Speech Server is a great way to deliver speech apps to users wherever they are via their "ubiquitous" phone.

We'd have to agree and applaud the first two bullets, though we'd qualify the first by noting that Windows Vista is a great desktop speech platform. Its also cool to see a platform emerge that no doubt will be on desktops everywhere in the future, that has speech APIs designed into it as an integral feature, rather than an add-on API/library that got slapped on after the fact and is not well integrated with the rest of the platform. This will no doubt result in more speech-enabled desktop applications, since developers knows the functionality will always be there on Vista. When speech was an add-on component, developers wouldn't bother using it in their apps as making sure the speech functionality was available on the target platform meant lots of additional work.

As I've already suggested, I have to disagree with the Brown's third take away. Clearly, it cannot be contested that VoiceXML is the reigning champion these days in the rather healthy speech server industry, and until Microsoft Speech Server supports VoiceXML, they'll continue to find themselves rowing up stream against a mighty strong current.

All in all though, its an interesting presentation and worth taking a look at.

View the presentation.

Little guy makes noise about XML patents

2005-11-01T12:28:00.000-08:00

A small company by the name of Scientigo claims that XML infringes upon two of its patents. The company's CEO claims that after meeting with 47 large software companies that utilize XML in their products, he's confident the patents will command royalties. It seems there are some substantial hurtles Scientigo will need to overcome in terms of prior art, but then again, many of us thought the Eolas patent would not be an issue for Microsoft either. The potential ramifications here are enormous, given XML's widespread use, and that includes our darling VoiceXML!

According to an article in today's Wall Street Journal, on Monday the Supreme Court declined to hear Microsoft's appeal on the Eolas patent lawsuit.

Read the article.

Another Motorola Handset Supporting Distributed Speech Recognition

2005-10-31T11:39:00.000-08:00

Today Motorola announced the i870 handset - a slick iDEN clamshell with Bluetooth, MP3 playback, still/video camera and other goodies. Though not mentioned in the press release, the i870 SDK (available for download on motorola.com) documents its support for distributed speech recognition (DSR). Standardized by the ETSI Aurora working group, with RTP payloads defined by IETF RFCs, DSR brings noise robust, bandwidth friendly speech recognition via powerful network-based speaker-independent speech recognizers to mobile handsets.

The i870 is follows the i605 shipped earlier this year - the industry's first DSR-enabled mobile handset.

Read the press release.

Ebay's Whitman: "Free Phone Calls by 2010"

2005-10-28T05:32:00.000-07:00

Meg Whitman during the recent Ebay quarterly conference call was under the gun of financial analysts for paying a bit too much for Skype. Defending the transaction, Whitman asserted that by utilizing VoIP and advertising subsidies, phone calls will gradually become free by 2010. Everybody understands what Ebay does, and everybody understands what Skype does, and both do their thing exceptionally well. The interesting question of course is, how might Ebay and Skype leverage each other's success to do something disruptive together? Use Skype to allow Ebay sellers/buyers to easily connect via VoIP calls? I hardly think so. The last thing a busy Ebay seller needs is his skype phone ringing off the hook: "is this thing new?" or "how come you didn't ship my stuff yet?". Seems at the moment Ebay and Skype are in two separate silos, both with regard to services provided, technologies used and underlying business models. It also seems any attempt to put them in one silo could very well involve a healthy dash of VoiceXML, or not? Thoughts?

Read the article.

Tellme Solicits VoiceXML Applications

2005-10-27T10:56:00.000-07:00

Registered users of Tellme Studio received the following email from Tellme today:

Dear Studio Developer,
Now you can start making money from the voice applications
you create using Tellme Studio!
Starting today you can submit your voice application to Tellme. Selected applications will be deployed and publicized to the more than 55 million Skype users who can then pay to use the application.
Visit Tellme Studio now to build, test and debug your application. The first applications will be deployed soon, so start building!
-The Tellme Studio Team

55 million users makes for a decent sized market, to put it modestly. Certainly enough to provide incentive to cause folks to spend some serious cycles noodling with various VoiceXML app ideas. It will be really interesting to see what sorts of apps begin to emerge from this process.

Interesting VoxSurf/BBC 3G Video Messaging Trial

2005-10-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

Voxsurf, previously known for its VoiceXML-based unified messaging applications is working with the BBC on an interesting video messaging application. The application allows users to send a video message to BBC Sports during football broadcasts with their feedback. The best videos are then re-broadcast and/or made available on the BBC website. This is an interesting example of using wireless technology to make broadcast content more interactive - something we'll likely see more as the wireless pipes get bigger and faster and the mobile clients more feature rich.

Read the article.

Bye Bye Scansoft!

2005-10-18T08:06:00.000-07:00

Today, Scansoft has officially announced it is adopting its new moniker: Nuance. This sort of makes sense as "Nuance" is a bit more generic. The name Scansoft was no doubt formed from the company's earlier work in document scanning technology. Unfortunately the "experience speaks for itself" video on the new website required authentication when I tried it this morning! Hopefully this is not the sort of experience they are referring to in the new corporate tagline!!!

Read the Nuance Press Release.

Cool Speech Project Alert: Making Webcasts Available to the Deaf

2005-10-18T05:51:00.000-07:00

IBM Research's CaptionMeNow project definitely falls into the "cool project" category. The idea is to automatically caption webcasts for people with hearing impairments by running the audio through a speech recognizer. Well, its almost automatic. They still have a human in the loop to make minor adjustments to the transcription produced by the speech recognizer.

We've reported on a similar approach in the past where speech technology is used to index video content, based on the audio. The CaptionMeNow article also suggests this technology could spill over into mainstream usage, as some people can more efficiently read and retain information in text vs. audible speech.

The author also claims TTS technology emerged from efforts to make written text more accessible to the visually. While I know TTS is commonly used by the blind, I didn't realize that it was the primary motivation behind early research in this area. In any case, I vividly remember my first encounter with a speech synthesizer as a teenager. My entire family assembled spellbound around my trust Commodore-64 when I first loaded up "Sam the talking computer" on the world's slowest disc drive (remember the Commodore 1541 floppy drive?). It was simply astonishing to realize the computer could intellibly say anything we typed in. Now everybody takes this stuff for granted.

Read the article about CaptionMeNow.

Ex-Nuance speech technologists can work at Yahoo

2005-10-07T06:22:00.000-07:00

A California court declines a temporary restraining order requested in a lawsuit filed by Nuance to bar a dozen Yahoo engineers from working on interactive speech technology that Nuance says it owns. Read more.

Yahoo Guts Nuance R&D

2005-09-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

Google is not the only one getting accused of poaching speech technologists from competitors. Most recently, Nuance has filed a lawsuit accusing Yahoo of stealing trade secrets. Evidently Yahoo has recently hired 13 former Nuance speech technologists. You can read the gory details in this recent article. Given, Scansoft's recent acquisition of Nuance, I suppose the 13 should of waited for their voluntary severance packages, and then joined Yahoo. ;-)

Will Skype Manage to Create the Elusive "Voice Web"?

2005-09-08T08:35:00.000-07:00

While VoiceXML has done MUCH to establish an competitive, innovative and level playing field for the traditionally proprietary IVR industry, it has yet to result in the "voice web" its original creators had anticipated. That is a web of voice content available to POTS phones that mirrors the web you surf on your desktop.

Today, Skype has announced their Voice Services Program, that in many ways seems to be all about creating this elusive voice web, for the Skype user community. Whether or not they will succeed at this remains to be seen, but they've certainly picked the right technology (VoiceXML) and right technology partners (Tellme, Voxeo, and VoxPilot platforms are the best available!).

What do you all think?

IBM Open Source Initiatives for Speech Technologies

2005-09-06T06:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick up-to-date summary of IBM's speech-related open source initiatives speech technology folks will want to be aware of. From the Reusable Dialog Components (RDC) contributed to Apache, to Eclipse-based tooling, IBM has been fairly active in this area in recent months.

http://advisor.com/doc/17032

Voice-enabled RSS Feeds

2005-09-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

Matt Headd posted this interesting article on using VoiceXML to read RSS feeds. Matt has a demo running on Voxeo's platform that allows you to browser recent postings on CNET news.com. (Dial 800-289-5570 and use pin 9991422919) . Matt's also got an informative VoiceXML/speech technology blog you'll want to check out: www.voiceingov.org.

Microsoft Awards Student for VoiceXML Application

2005-08-30T04:56:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting read about a student in Ireland who was recently received "Microsoft's Award for Student Excellence." The interesting stuff is in the details - the student was recognized for a VoiceXML application he authored for partially sighted people. While of course he wrote the app using Visual Studio/ASP.net, he evidently was not penalized for choosing VoiceXML over SALT.

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/news.nv?storyid=single5300

Pass the SALT; VXML Seems To Be King

2005-08-18T06:12:00.000-07:00

For those of you who have followed the VXML vs. SALT discussions in the past, you'll find this article to be a fairly accurate summary of the present situation. The author's experience with a representative of one of the founding SALT companies who refused to speak about SALT at Speech World is not at all surprising. Jim Ferrans has published plenty of data that suggests SALT Forum members (with the exception of Microsoft, at least at the moment) are in fact the biggest promoters of VoiceXML.

http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2005/aug/1168984.htm

VoiceXML Forum's Platform Cert. Program Gains Momentum

2005-08-01T09:39:00.000-07:00

The number of VoiceXML platform providers achieving VoiceXML Forum Platform Certification is now twelve. It seems that platform certification has now reached the status of being a "must have", and no longer just an optional bullet point in the future list to distinguish your platform from the competitors.

See the 8/1/2005 VoiceXML Forum press release for details.

IETF Publishes Multimodal Synchronization Internet Draft

2005-07-15T06:30:00.000-07:00

IBM and Motorola recently submitted an Internet Draft to the IETF defining a protocol called "Distributed Multimodal Synchronization Protocol" (DMSP). This is something folks interested in multimodal interfaces are going to want to take a look at:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-engelsma-dmsp-00.txt

In a nutshell, the protocol enables multimodal interactions on a mobile device by synchronizing a GUI application running on the mobile device with a remote VoiceXML interpreter. The protocol seems to assume the GUI application is an XHTML browser and the presentation markup being rendered is XHTML+Voice (a multimodal markup proposed by IBM/Motorola/Opera) but that doesn't appear to be a requirement.

Lexus LS: The Talking Automobile

2005-07-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

The last page of the WSJ's "Weekend Journal" was a full page color ad ran by Lexus focusing on the speech technology incorporated in their vehicles. It makes for an interesting read if you're a speech technologist. In large print, under the photo of a Lexus LS it reads:

"Having a conversation with your car can now be considered quite normal."

The following text goes into more detail under a row of photos showing the nav display and other dashboard controls:

"Admit it. You've been talking to your cars for years. Urging them up those hills. Giving them pep talks on those frosty mornings. Some of us have been bestowed names on our vehicles (not always pleasnt ones.) But when you own a Lexus LS, you no longer have to hide your little talks from startled onlookers. You can speak freely without embarrassment. Because the LS is available with an ingenious device called the Lexus voice-activated DVD Navigation System. So when you talk to it, it talks back. You see, it actually responds to over 100 of your spoken commands. It will guide you home, to your favorite restaurant, to the ball game, or wherever. But perhaps most heartwarning of all is that you'll no longer be having a one-way conversation. Which is a lot more than you can say for you old car. Visit your local Lexus dealer for a test drive today."

This is an interesting ad and says a great deal about the maturation of speech technology. The Lexus LS obviously has no shortage of snazzy and convenient features to plug, but this particular ad is focused solely on the voice-activated nav feature. spkydog hasn't gotten to the local dealer yet for that test drive, but the voice-activated nav must work pretty good for them to draw attention on it like this.

Speegle Speak Perfect Web Search

2005-06-29T05:55:00.000-07:00

Check this site out if you haven't already:

http://www.speegle.co.uk/

Its a google like search, but in addition to the visual search listing you get an audio (TTS) rendition of the search results. The search site presumably is a technology preview of the underlying technology (PanaVox Speak Perfect). A functional and presumably real website using the technology in an ecommerce setting is:

http://www.cezine.net/catalog/

Speech Tech Turns IT Managers into Heros

2005-06-28T07:28:00.000-07:00

Today the IT Manager's Journal recently published an interesting read on the role of speech technology can play in improving the bottom line. VoiceXML is mentioned as helpful, but not a panacea, as vendors tend to extend their implementations. In the same breath, Microsoft is cited as muddying the waters with its promotion of SALT.

I would take exception with the author's conjecture that Intel and Cisco are solidly in Microsoft's corner in this area. While both companies originally joined the now defunct SALTForum, the author (Paul Korzeniowski) must not be aware of the fact that most recently Intel joined the VoiceXML Forum as a sponsor member, and the active role Intel folks are playing in the VoiceXML Forum. Cisco is also a member of the VoiceXML Forum at the promoter level.

Another interesting anecdote is a quotation from the Garter Group pointing out the fact that Microsoft's Speech Server 2004 has not had much impact on the market.

Read the article.

Big Blue has a clue, when it comes to speech tech!

2005-06-27T06:06:00.000-07:00

There are tons of companies involved in speech technology, yet when it comes to R&D and introducing core speech technology enablers, and setting industry trends, there are the big three: IBM, Microsoft, Nuance/Scansoft. Its interesting and important to pay close attention to the approach the big three take in the marketplace, as the approach of any or all of them take will have direct consequences on where the rest of the herd goes. Last week we touched on the Microsoft approach, and were left somewhat mystified as to why they are apparently heading towards the cliff, at least with regard to speech technology.

In contrast, IBM is an altogether a different story, perhaps best summarized in the transcript of this recent TMCnet interview with Bruce Morse, VP of Contact Center Solutions at IBM. Morse provides a crisp sketch of IBM's three-pronged focus in the speech industry: contact centers, multimodal interaction, and embedded speech enablers. None of this is particularly surprising as each of the big three is essentially targeting these same areas, among other things. What is interesting is that IBM's approach is well-positioned in terms of capturing speech developer mindshare, while Microsoft's approach is that of brute force, leveraging its lethal Windows control point and not necessarily paying attention to where the market has been going, at least thus far.

Morse mentions, VoiceXML - a mature W3C Recommendation that happens to be the industry standard for implementing speech dialogs. Microsoft promotes SALT, a non-standard technology introduced by Microsoft and rubberstamped by a number of avid VoiceXML supporters (with the exception of IBM) simply out of curiosity and/or fear of now paying lip service to anything Microsoft might be doing. Incidently, SALT was originally toted as a multimodal dialog markup that supposedly addressed VoiceXML's weakness, which according to Microsoft was that VoiceXML was only suitable for voice-only applications. Ironically, since then, the miniscule take-up of SALT in the marketplace has been for the most part limited to voice-only applications, while millions of multimodal VoiceXML (aka XHTML + Voice) have shipped in Opera 8 (Windows version) with IBM speech technology enablers.

Morse mentions, MRCP, an IETF standard in progress that provides an open speech resource integration. The MRCP version 1 draft specification alone has enjoyed widespread support in the industry by virtually every major speech resource vendor in the market, with the exception of Microsoft. To be fair, vendors (besides Microsoft) have supported Microsoft's MRCP equivalent (aka SAPI) but not to the degree MRCP has been supported in its comparably shorter life to-date.

Morse cites IBM's enthusiasm for Eclipse and the variety of free speech technology tooling they have introduced on the Eclipse platform. Microsoft of course has its proprietary Microsoft Visual Studio .NET - a not-so-shabby IDE that has hard-to-ignore mindshare of its own. Neverthless, things are changing rapidly. JBuilder, Visual Studio's only real competitor in the past simply cost too much - much more than an MSDN universal subscription which essentially gave you everything you needed in terms of Microsoft dev tools. Eclipse offers essentially everything JBuilder used to, at the right price! spkydog predicts the eclipse revolution will eventually provide Microsoft competition it can't afford to ignore, and this is a good thing as it assures developers that both Eclipse and Visual Studio will continue to get better.

On that note, we have to agree with a comment to one of my recent postings by IBM's Mr. Jablokov. Its not necessarily a bad thing that Microsoft has not yet woke up to the reality of VoiceXML, it will ensure that VoiceXML keeps getting better. Hopefully, the few SALT survivors will receive a similar benefit, but they ought not hold their breath.

Where are the SALT Hosting Providers?

2005-06-25T07:46:00.000-07:00

Just where are all the SALT hosting providers out there? Message Technology's press release this week raises this interesting question. Consider for example this quote:

"By offering the SALT hosting environment in conjunction with industry standard VoiceXML hosting platforms, MTI will make available to customers a range of hosting options not offered through other industry-wide hosters. "

In other words, what is being said here is that unlike industry standard VoiceXML, for which there is not shortage of hosting providers, very few hosting providers have decided to host SALT applications. Which of course begs the question, why is this the case? Consider a few facts:

The SALT specification has been publically available since Microsoft launched the SALT Forum, way back in summer of 2001. That's four long years ago, yet there is precious little takeup of the specification in the market.
The SALT Forum itself hasn't issued a press release for exactly two years now.
The Microsoft Speech Server has been shipping with SALT support for over a year, and despite the initial hype it has gained very little traction in the market place.

It is quite likely here that what is happening is that there are a few firms willing to bet on SALT, simply because Microsoft is behind it, and that fact alone means it just might someday succeed. That explaination aside, what continues to baffle spkydog is why Microsoft insists on ignoring industry standard VoiceXML? Even if they eventually get a toe-hold in the marketplace with SALT by using brute force, why waste all that energy swimming upstream? Imagine what would happen if Microsoft added fully compliant VoiceXML 2.x support to MSS and offered it at low cost? If Microsoft expects to make a dent in the new Nuance/Scansoft's combined marketshare (over 70% of the ASR server ports deployed if I have my data correct) supporting VoiceXML would be one reasonable way of accomplishing it.

For some reason, spkdog suspects that the folks behind VoiceXML prefer the status quo. :-)

Voxeo's Platform

2005-06-21T06:08:00.000-07:00

We've discovered a bit more evidence that its not just spkydog who thinks Voxeo's Voice Fusion Server is one of the best (if not the best!) VoiceXML platform available! Unlike many of the hosted solutions available today, whose implementations are simply inspired by the W3C's VoiceXML 2.0/2.1 specifications, Voxeo's platform is one of the most rigorous and complete VoiceXML 2.0/2.1 implementations available. Not to mention their leadership in CCXML and legendary "Extreme Support"! If you haven't tried out Voxeo's free online developer studio yet, spkydog encourages you to go discover for yourself what you're missing: http://evolution.voxeo.com.

Read the TMC article.

VoiceXML 2.1 becomes a W3C Candidate Recommendation

2005-06-14T06:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the W3C announced that the VoiceXML 2.1 became a Candidate Recommendation - one step closer to becoming an official Recommendation. VoiceXML 2.1 adds a number of useful constructs to VoiceXML 2.0, including data, disconnect, grammar, foreach, mark, property, script, and transfer. There have been a number of articles in the VoiceXML Review (official e-zine of the VoiceXML Forum) on the new features and how they work. Check out Marchand's "First Words" column.

Read the VoiceXML 2.1 Candidate Recommendation.

Xbox 360 to use Fonix Voice Technology

2005-05-31T10:33:00.000-07:00

Fonix Speech, a division of Fonix Corp. will continue to deliver voice command technology to Microsoft's Xbox 360. The company previously provided voice recognition development tools for the Xbox to let developers integrate voice commands into games.

Read the article.

Microsoft Launches Microsoft Speech Server 2004 R2

2005-05-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

Bummer, still no support for industry standard VoiceXML. When are those guys in Redmond going to wake up? ;-)

Read the press release.

VoiceXML Platform Certification Watch!

2005-05-20T05:30:00.000-07:00

Looks like two more vendors got added to the VoiceXML Forum's list of certified VoiceXML platforms: Avaya and Genesys. I haven't seen press releases from either, though. I guess achieving platform certification these days is not so newsworthy anymore - its a given.

Another Acquisition for ScanSoft

2005-05-18T05:54:00.000-07:00

Speech and imaging technology firm ScanSoft has acquired Illinois-based MedRemote, a developer of medical informatics and transcription workflow services, for $6.2m.

Read the article.

World's First and Only Voice Recognition Hearing Aid

2005-05-16T06:01:00.000-07:00

"A person speaks in a normal tone of voice, the system translates the spoken words to written text, displays the text, and the impaired person reads what has been said. They then respond and a conversation is carried out in a near normal fashion."

Read the article.

"We like being private", Mike McCue - Tellme CEO

2005-05-16T05:53:00.000-07:00

We posted recently on Tellme IPO rumors. Here is an interesting read on the same topic published last week by Red Herring. IPO or not, this "$100-million-plus juggernaut of a voice platform and networking company" will be around for a while!

spkydog prediction rings true: Scansoft Acquires Nuance!

2005-05-09T19:28:00.000-07:00

Late last year spkydog mused about the possibilities of Scansoft soon gobbling up Nuance. The inevitable has happened. This evening, Scansoft announced it had agreed to acquire its rival Nuance for $221 million. The combined company will operate under the Nuance name, and should enjoy a lion's share of the speech server market. What could possibly be next? spkydog previously posted about Microsoft's veiled support of VoiceXML... perhaps the next step will be their acquisition of IBM's speech technology? ;-)

Read the article.

Speech Reco in AT&T Exec's Top 10 Predictions

2005-05-04T06:39:00.000-07:00

Hossein Eslambolchi, CTO and CIO of AT&T, delivered a visionary keynote at Interop in Las Vegas in the form of a Top 10 List. Speech recognition (as a security biometric) and e-collaboration share the sixth entry in the list:

"No. 6: e-Collaboration will dominate the workplace -- promoting foster next-generation speech recognition.

The pervasiveness of broadband will foster greater collaboration of all kinds, across business and entertainment industries, said Eslambolchi. Additionally, the rapid development pace of voice recognition will make voice identification the biometric security method of choice, he said. "Pin numbers and pass codes in the next 10 years will disappear," he said. "

Read the article.

New issue of the VoiceXML Review ezine published

2005-05-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

Don't forget to checkout the March/April issue of the VoiceXML Forum's "VoiceXML Review" ezine that was just published.

Read the VoiceXML Review.

Leading VoiceXML Vendors Tellme and BeVocal Go Public in 2005?

2005-05-02T05:38:00.000-07:00

The San Jose Business Journal quotes Ms. Marci Gottlieb on the IPO subject:

"We have no plans to go public now. That's the party line, But if the market conditions are right and Tellme has a use for the money, it may go public."

According to the bizjournal article, Steve Tran, one of BeVocal's founders responded to the IPO question with essentially the same answer. Another interesting data point from Mr. Tran is his claim that BeVocal clients prevent 50%-80% of their calls going to live operators. That's a bit higher than the 15%-30% numbers the article quotes for traditional IVR premise solutions.

Evidently BeVocal's recent $10M round of additional venture capital has been provoking the IPO rumors.

Read the San Jose Business Journal article.

V (as in VXML) for Standards Victory

2005-04-27T07:12:00.000-07:00

Paul Korzeniowski publishes an interesting article entitled "Speech Recognition Software Slowly Making Progress" in TechNewsWorld. Although published just this morning, Paul has one detail incorrect in his assessment of the VoiceXML vs. SALT issue. While one of the original members of the now defunct SALT Forum, readers should note that Intel is not exactly "solidly in Microsoft's corner" with regard to speech standards. Their recent upgrade to sponsor member and their seat on the board of directors of the VoiceXML Forum must have somehow escaped Mr. Koreniowski's attention.

Voxeo Achieves VoiceXML 2.0 Platform Certification

2005-04-25T07:11:00.000-07:00

This morning Voxeo officially announced that their VoiceCenter VoiceXML platform has mustered formal certification by the VoiceXML Forum. Combining the legendary Motorola VoxGateway, one of the first and best performing VoiceXML interpreters on the market, along with the brilliance, energy and voice platform know how of the Voxeo technical team, makes VoiceCenter one of the best VoiceXML deployment platforms available on the planet! But don't take spydog's word for it - go try Voxeo's Evolution 2005 developer portal yourself at http://evolution.voxeo.com!

Read the Voxeo press release.