TuVox Voice Interface

pablos writes: "NYTimes has an article about Tuvox who set up Handspring and Activision with voice interfaces for tech support. Apparently they can do away with the annoying 'press # now' menus. I've used things like TellMe, which played an ad everytime it didn't understand you, but I'm wondering if this sort of thing is starting to work anywhere. Anybody called Handspring for tech support lately?"

Comments

This isn't..

[saqmaster]

..exactly new, is it?

It's been a while since there was really much media hype about voice recognition technologies. Sure, the whole voice activated menu's "1, 2 etc." has been around for quite a few years, but I suppose there is a huge difference between repeating a few numbers than describing technical problems. I mean, is this literally a flowchart menu with various diagnostic paths or does it actually try and understand a sentance? If it's the former, then that is nothing more advanced than what is currently available and probably in use elsewhere.

I wonder what would be more frustrating, repeating yourself twenty times to a computer to battle through a menu, or sitting for twenty minutes trying to explain your problem to a ex k-mart 1st line support engineer. The choice is yours :)

Re:AT&T has been doing this for a while

[gazbo]

I assume you mean Wildfire? Never have I laughed so much as when a friend of mine in a pub attempted to manage his voicemail. It must have taken 10 minutes to delete a message 'THROW IT AWAY!' Oh god, he looked such a fool.

And voice activated dialing - same person (this time at a club) tried to voice dial another friend - ended up calling his parents at 2:00am. They were not happy bunnies.

In the club this could be expected, but the pub was not too loud. The technology that Orange is using for Wildfire is just not up to scratch for normal use.

PS. There are some interesting 'features' in Wildfire (these phrases will not be exact, but play around with them): 'Do me a favour' gets the response 'What kind of favour?' you can then say 'I'm feeling depressed' which gets the response 'Why don't you tell someone who cares' or 'What does a cow say?' which gets the response 'MOOOOO!'

Risks of voice recognition

[acb]

A friend of mine (from Australia) went to the US a year or two ago, and found himself needing to call a service which used such a system. When he did, he found that it could not understand his accent; after three unsuccessful attempts at doing an "American" accent, he gave up.

The moral of this story: make sure that there's a touch-tone menu to fall back on.

Open Source Voicecoders Needed

[Dan Crash]

I've been working with VXML, CallXML, and other voice oriented IVR solutions for a while on a hobby basis, and I've been really frustrated that no workable open source VXML solution exists.

SpeechWorks' OpenVXI, originally promoted as an open source VXML interpreter, has turned out not to be a good one. Speechworks developers maintain the code, and refuse to incorporate the patches and requests of the open source community, in favor of keeping OpenVXI tied to Speechworks products. The codebase could be forked, but it's really not worth investing the effort in such a brittle product tied to proprietary solutions.

Bayonne, the GNU telephony server, is great and getting better all the time. It currently supports a strong scripting language for DTMF applications, and Bayonne's XML plugin structure and built-in support for multiple telephony cards makes it the logical choice for open source VXML.

All that's needed at this point is to finish integrating Bayonne with an open source Text-To-Speech engine (most-likely candidates are Flite or Festival), Automatic Speech Recognition engine (in this case, Sphinx) and write the XML plugin. But there is a shortage of coders with the skill and time to do this.

I really think small business and the average Slashdotter could benefit from an open source VXML solution. Small businesses could create professional telephony apps that could make them much more competitive (from accepting credit cards securely over the phone to providing dedicated 24-hr support numbers for their products), while creative coders could use it for everything from Eliza-style chatbot answering machines to having your boxen call you up and describe a hack attempt as it's being made.

I'd love to see a VXML enabled Bayonne blow TellMe and others out of the water. If you're intrigued and you'd like to get involved, check out Bayonne's Sourceforge site and sign up for the mailing list.