Speech Technology

Hey, You Kids! Get Off My Lawn!

At January's Cloud Computing Summit in Florida, people landed on the topic of new interfaces for speech technology based on cloud technology. At one point, a participant commented on "classic" call control XML-based applications. CCXML uses XML to manipulate the telephone network and can also run on a hosted server, but it requires specialized expertise and complex integration with more conventional programming languages. CCXML as a whole, the participant seemed to imply, was practically anci...

The Guitar and the Case of Opportunity Lost

For Christmas, the author bought her husband, an unrivaled air-guitarist since the high school days, a popular guitar-playing videogame. It has an air of incredible realism -- from strumming the guitar, to watching the animated band play, to being scored by the hypothetical crowd. In all, the game presents a totally immersive, highly motivating user experience. So after polling a few friends and considering her own daily existence, here's her Ultimate Speech Wish List: 1. alarm clock, 2. show...

Youtube Expands Video Transcription Option for All

Back in November, YouTube added a feature that generates captions and transcripts for videos uploaded to its servers. At the time, the feature had been enabled for only a small number of universities, as well as channels like PBS and National Geographic -- media outlets that traditionally air a lot of talks and interviews. YouTube, which is owned by Google, uses Google's automatic speech recognition, speech-to-text, and voice search technologies, together with its own captioning system, to ge...

Speech Takes Flight Among Pilots and Tower Personnel

When you think of speech technologies in the travel industry, a likely image that comes to mind is of a frantic business traveler in a cab on his way to the airport, calling his carrier's interactive voice response system to check the status of his flight. Of particular note are speech recognition technologies that are helping pilots fly planes and air traffic control tower personnel more safety monitor and communicate with planes, both in the air and on the ground waiting for clearance to ta...

It's a Multimodal. Multilingual World

Should You Shore Up Your Resources Through Offshoring?

Offshoring technology jobs is a highly charged subject, with job losses mounting and pay cuts for those left in their roles in North America and Western Europe. It is also driving students in the same geographies to reconsider their plans for careers in information technology. With that in mind, let people consider which roles would be appropriate for offshoring should you receive a directive to do so for your IVR project or ongoing operations. The following grouping of roles and their suitab...

Are Consumers More Responsive to Male or Female Voices?

Almost half of Americans (48%) believe a male voice is more forceful, while 46% believe a female voice is more soothing, according to a recent poll of nearly 2,200 US adults by Adweek and Harris Interactive. Common practice has been to use a female voice, though that might not always be the best choice, according to Phil Shinn, a speech application developer and voice user interface designer at the IVR Design Group, a professional services company that does interactive voice response (IVR) de...

On the Move

The US and Europe are separated by roughly 3,000 miles, five time zones, and the world's second largest ocean. To travel from New York to Paris by plane takes about six hours. The trip from New York to the UK by transatlantic ocean liner takes about five days. Despite this distance the world is getting smaller. Thanks to technological advances and increased free trade, people the world over are citizens not only of their own countries but the much larger global community as well. According to...

Gartner Rebuilds Its Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure

Within the contact center infrastructure market, telecommunications giant Avaya now lays claim to approximately half of all worldwide revenue, according to the newly restored Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure. What's more, the authors of the report point to Avaya's acquisition of Nortel Networks in December as the symbol for an era of market consolidation. This year's report shows a lack of movement within the four defined quadrants, suggesting that little has changed i...

Over Heard/Under Heard

According to the Emirates News Agency, Ibn Sina -- the world's first Arabic-speaking Creepy Talking Robots (CTR) from Acapela Group and the Interactive Robots and Media Lab at United Arab Emirates University -- recently hopped aboard Emirates Airlines flight EK817 from Dubai to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Ibn Sina traveled first class all the way. That's not to say Ibn Sina -- who was headed to Riyadh for a conference at which he was an exhibit -- isn't a great CTR. He can recognize faces, understa...

Sound Bytes

Trend Spotting

Voice biometrics is an advanced contact center technology that analysts and vendors have expected to proliferate among enterprises with near hockey-stick growth. Voice biometrics technology powers solutions that determine the identity of an individual by measuring the physical and behavioral characteristics of that individual's voice. In recent years, providers of voice biometrics engines have partnered with providers of contact center technologies. Voxeo, West Interactive, Tellme Networks, C...

When in Rome ...

The European Union is an economic and political bloc of 27 independent countries, with a combined population of 501 million. Among the countries that comprise the European Union, there are 23 official and working languages. With such Iinguistic diversity among countries -- and sometimes within different parts of the same country -- designing a speech system for the European market is certainly a daunting task. Communicating to such a diverse audience truly is as complex as it seems. Nonethele...

English-to-English: Translation

Will Multimodal Kill the Speech Star?

Speech technologies are evolving. People now live in a multimodal, multichannel world. And all of them -- speech vendors, enterprises, and end users -- need to keep pace with the latest innovations or be left behind like washed-up radio stars. As the speech technology marketplace moved forward, it became increasingly appropriate to pair speech with other modes of input, says Bill Scholz, president of the Applied Voice Input/Output Society. Ryan Joe and Aphrodite Brinsmead, associate analysts ...

Delivering the Intangibles

When a piece of cooking equipment in a restaurant kitchen goes down, it's crucial that the restaurant be able to get it back up and running quickly. So it's no surprise, then, that AllPoints Foodservice Parts & Supplies, which furnishes replacement parts and related items to the repair technicians, equipment dealers, and others in the business of servicing commercial kitchen equipment, is under a lot of pressure to perform. That was a pressing concern when in 2007 it began integrating ICS...

Athletico Stretches Its Speech Installation

At AthletiCo, an Oak Brook, IL-based provider of physical therapy, occupational therapy, and fitness services, 360 clinicians generate thousands of patient notes every day across the company's 55 locations. That's a lot of medical documents, which can result in heavy transcription costs. Since 2002, AthletiCo had been using background speech recognition courtesy of Nuance Communications' Dictaphone Enterprise Speech System. And while AthletiCo was very pleased with the solution, the company's...

Tts Finds Global Media

With the advent of multilanguage text-to-speech (TTS) that is attractive to the ear, the world is beginning to embrace the technology as a viable language solution. From television to Web sites, interactive voice response to ATMs, corporate videos to games and toys, the world is rushing toward a new destiny that will be multilingual, enabled through TTS and automated translation. Within the next five years, at least 50,000 major Internet channels will be running 24/7, as well as hundreds of t...

Shame On You, Authors Guild

In the author's previous column he wrote about the Authors Guild's stance against text-to-speech-enabled (TTS) e-books. Continuing the discussion, the Authors Guild also contends that using TTS on Amazon's Kindle is a copyright violation. Copyright law was created to promote creativity and reward writers for their work. This law, which has evolved since the l700s, states, in part, that an author has the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute his work, to perform his work publicly (includ...

Accessibility in Voice and Multimodal Applications

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, said, "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone, regardless of disability, is an essential aspect." This applies to the voice Web as well as the more typical graphical Web. Ensuring information on the Web is available to everyone is the goal of the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative. One of the key W3C accessibility standards is the "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines". Better accessibility is ...

Getting to an Siv Module for Voicexml 3.0

A tremendous amount of market interest has grown in speaker identification and verification (SIV). VoiceXML developers are being asked to add SIV to existing applications and to build new SIV applications, while VoiceXML-compliant companies, such as Voxeo, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, and Angel.com, have active partnerships with SIV technology companies. All of this favors the development of a solid SIV module for VoiceXML 3.0 as soon as possible so standards-based SIV can be inte...