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Talking Palm
Isotopia writes: "This article from the NY Times is very cool. It's about this guy from IBM who was able to put voice recognition on his Palm III and it talks to him!
It can remind him about meetings and it will tell him when his battery is getting low." I bet if you used this much, it would tell you how low the battery is -- frequently. That aside, it's amazing that IBM has been able to squeeze this onto a Palm.
This is annoying, I don't have an account with the nytimes and people who post these threads never seem to give us a link that works without an nytimes login. I seem to recall something like 'archives' in the url to get around this. Is this possible, and if so, can you people please start linking in this fashion to this news source.
thank you.
IBM Via Voice is supposed to have similar software bundled with the new Ipaq 3700 and 3800 series, but since those won't ship until November, I haven't had a chance to play with it.
Also, there has been a voice-controlled Contacts lookup program on the Pocket PC for a while (too lazy to look up the link), as well as software that will read the time to you at regular intervals and when you turn the device on (TimeTalk).
I'm not trying to discount what's being done here on Palm (in fact, it's amazing they got it to work given the anemic processing power in Palms), but I wanted to mention that a lot of this functionality is available on Pocket PCs here and now.
Jenova_Six
Saw and had several conversations with this person at an IBM-only conference up in Vancouver earlier this year. It's actually just a proof of concept to show off some cool uses of voice rec/synth technology.
:-)
It was a standard Palm III that had a snap on module with it's own processor. It ran off special batteries that only last for like 2 hours. Not really something ready for prime-time.
HOWEVER - he was doing some REALLY cool things with it. They have several languages in it. As a result, one of the applications was a basic language translator. He spoke in English, out came japanese. He graphiti'ed in English, out came German speech.
He was able to speak to create memos, appointments, to-dos, etc. It would also read those back to him.
While I'm not allowed (damn NDA!) to discuss the future plans that they have, suffice it to say, that this is just the first step. If they get the funding to take his vision to reality, I'm DEFINATELY ditching my old Palm for a new IBM unit someday.
Also, all those IBM commercials showing really wierd stuff (like the coke machine that dispenses when you use your cell phone, or the guy trading stocks in the middle of that park using the head mounted monocal display) - that's all REAL stuff that they actually DO have working today as prototypes.
God I wish we could fast forward 3 years....
Processing power: this is a nuisance. It's not that you can't get enough processing power into a handheld or cellphone these days, but:
User expectations (a.k.a., the Star Trek problem, a.k.a., even that clunker without circuit breakers that Kirk talked to could always understand him perfectly): This is a general speech-recognition problem, but it gets more intense the more mass-market you go. Palm pilots are largely successful because they don't try to do too much, but do what they do well. It's hard to set that kind of expectation reasonably for nontrivial speech recognition. Even worse, I think that people are actually more demanding of a self-contained special-purpose device (with more limited resources, as above) than they are of general PC software.
User interface design: this is still a largely unsolved problem; how do you really want to interact with a PDA by voice? It's hard to arrange a device so you can look at it and be close to the microphone at the same time, which complicates the picture. Dragon Systems back in their pre-acquisition days sold a product called "Dragon NaturallySpeaking Mobile Organizer" that was an interesting step along the way. They didn't put the speech recognition into the handheld -- speech was recorded into a handheld recorder, recognized on a PC and synched up with PDA later -- but the product did attempt to deal with the interface questions of large-vocabulary PDA-based speech recognition; e.g., when you say something, is it intended for your calendar, your email, or your address book? How many variations of "next Tuesday" can the device understand? The general interface problem, once everything's in the same device, is still open and interesting.
My Newton MessagePad 2000 (upgraded to 2100) has been talking for years. Apple wrote a Macintalk extension years ago, which was never released. It was leaked however, and is now widely available.
Furthermore, just recently, an old Dragon Dictate demo for the Newton has been found and released. While the Newton's vocabulary is limited, this is true voice reognition nonetheless.
I dislike Apple Computer in general, and the fact that they discontinued the Newton didn't help my opinion. Nonetheless, I still feel the Newton MP2.1k is the greatest PDA available, even today. Unfortunate that Apple no longer makes the best product they've ever produced.
How do you know that this was done using IBM's vast resources? All accounts have this as "a guy" from IBM.
Desperation is a stinky cologne
[Disclaimer: I was one of the contractors on the IBM Personal Speech Assistant project; my name is in the acknowledgements in that document.]
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.