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.

Comments

More annoying technology...

[Psarchasm]

Not that I am a huge fan of meetings or anything, but the last thing I want is more annoying handheld technology showing up in meetings.

*pager*
*cellfone*
*palm*


And now a frigging TALKING PALM? Then again...

Eliza + Talking Palm + Male Real Doll = no more meetings ever. Hmm....

haha talk to the hand

[digitalsushi]

talk to the hand cause the palm aint liss'ning. oh wait, yeah it is. hey palm, wassup G

yo my battery is audi 5000 aight peace out

lates, palm

Better Uses

[under_score]

Personally, I think this sort of tech is better used in cell phones. A device which already has a decent text input system is probably only made more clumsy by including speech recognition and text to speech capabilities. Why? Because it "requires" switching modes of interfacing with the device which is something humans don't tend to like. Rather, most people will choose one mode and stick with it. And, be honest now, you can guess which mode that will be: stylus or keyboard. On the other hand, in cell phones, the vastly predominant mode is already voice and hearing oriented. It would be really nice to be able to get rid of the keypad (or at least severly reduce its usage). Other reasons cell phones are a better place for this tech: when you listen to a cell phone, what you hear is private. Cellphones cannot speak at you: they ring first. Two different rings would be sufficient to distinguish between a person call and the cell phone telling you something.

Pocket PCs can already do this

[Jenova_Six]

I have a new HP Jornada 567 (Pocket PC 2002), and one of the applications that comes with it is Mobile Conversay (www.conversay.com). It allows me to talk to my Jornada, and allows it to respond in a computerized voice. I can make inquiries (what time is it? how much battery is left?) and it will speak the response. I can tell it to launch or close any program I have installed. It also comes with Voice Calendar, which allows the Jornada to navigate my calendar and read my appointments to me. Very cool. There are other modules in the works, like Voice Tasks, Voice Contacts, and Voice Notes that should be available for download soon.Overall, it works pretty well.

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

They used additional hardware

[drinkypoo]

That aside, it's amazing that IBM has been able to squeeze this onto a Palm.

They didn't. They made the palm bigger by adding at least a mic, speaker, and an additional processor to it. The first two are par for this course, though the handspring visor at least has a mic built in. The third makes this into a pretty basic accomplishment for someone with IBM's resources, especially if that CPU has more RAM attached to it, or embedded in it.

All I really want is a speech recognition module for visor. I don't want my palm to talk to me, one of the nice things about a handheld is that only I can tell what's going on on it. The visor already has a mic built in, so now I just need the speech recognition hardware/software in a handspring module.

More embarassing than innovative

[nyquist_theorem]

I can't see this being a bit hit. My experience with voice recognition software, even on fast computers, has been that without a good microphone and very little background noise, recognition is horrific. Most of the world is, unfortunately, rather noisy and as such muttering into a palm pilot is going to produce very little workable speech - and yelling into a palm pilot is likely to get one arrested for being a freak.

Worse - imagine sitting in a boardroom meeting.
CEO: "well, gang, sales results are up for this quarter!"

fifteen cronies all mutter into thier palm pilots in unison - "well comma gang comma sales results are up for this quarter exclamation mark new sentence" except for the one poor sap who accidentally brushed his thumb across the front panel of the palm while dictating, and is madly muttering "begin edit delete r-e-s-u-l-t-s-delete-s end edit". Just what the world needs - longer meetings.

Or a girl gives you her number at a bar, and you proceed to yell it into your palm pilot - is that cool? What about those of us who love using our palm pilots while in the bathroom? Imagine wandering into a public bathroom with geeks muttering in every stall? The kind of stuff I wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night having nightmares about, I tell you. Even grocery stores would produce entries like this:

TODO LIST: Don't forget attention shoppers to get sale on meatloaf a gift in aisle for mom seven

I can't see it being too useful.

New To-Do

[KFury]

"Palm, record new to-do item."

"Ready"

"Remember not to refer to boss as 'dickhead' when talking to you. End recording."

"Note saved."

(later) *Bling,bling* "Reminder: Weekly jerkoff meeting with Dickhead in 10 minutes."

"Um, I thought I told you we bumped that meeting up... Now please apologize to Mr. Cooper."

Seen it in action. Proof of concept only

[Ledfoot]

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.... :-)

Handheld speech recognition

[d5w]

I used to work on speech recognition, for both large and small systems. Variations on this have been done for a while at a number of places. Small vocabularies are easier to deal with, but if you're dealing with more than a tiny vocabulary, there are a bunch of interesting problems, some of which are specific to handhelds.

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:

• You can't get the resources you can on a desktop, which means you're likely to do worse on large vocabulary tasks than desktop products.
• The cost of the processing power makes it hard to put the speech recognition where you really want it. (Someone else mentioned cell-phones: in the U.S., at least, all but the highest-end cell phone hardware is extremely cost-sensitive, since it winds up being subsidized by service providers. Does higher-end speech recognition offer enough value to offset the added hardware cost?

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.

Old News... for Newton owners.

[The Jake]

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.