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Opera Promises Voice-Operated Web Browser
unassimilatible writes "Opera's latest browser talks and listens, according to AP.
The new browser incorporates IBM's ViaVoice technology, enabling the computer to ask what the user wants and "listen" to the request. "Hi. I am your browser. What can I do for you?" asked a laptop with the demonstration versions of the browser. The message can be personalized, such as greeting users by name. The computer learns to recognize users' voices, accents and inflections by having them read a list of words into a microphone. Opera plans to first launch an English version of the voice browser for computers running the Windows operating system. Versions for other systems, including handhelds, will follow. Opera's press release has more details, including Opera's hopes that people will adopt this technology for presentations - and to replace PowerPoint."
You can do the same with just about any other browser on Mac OS X. With the speech module you can connect a voice command to any keyboard sequence. I have it set up to switch tabs, create tabs, and with the 'Make this page speakable' voice command, you can navigate to any page, making it work like a bookmark system.
What would be nice is if 'Speech' could recognize the commands for a particular application without switching focus. So I could be coding on one screen while browsing on another.
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
Also as the article notes one can buy more extensive add-on products like IBM's Mac/PC ViaVoice & Dragon's family of products as well as numerous other lesser-known and more specialized ones.
That's today, already on millions of desktops, ready and capable of driving web browsers, sitting there ignored.
Why?
- Few folks are even aware that speech recognition or speech generation are trivially or already installed on their computers
- When general users do use these capabilities they're usually disappointed they're not more like the ones on TV, where a simple ambiguous command is immediately interpreted and plot-appropriate material magically recited out
- Most folks don't have microphones plugged into their computers, or they're ones unsuitable for speech recognition
- Few folks bother to spend the time and energy into fine-tuning their microphones and training the speech recognition for their particular speech pattern and vocabulary
- Reading text is faster then hearing it, even at faster-then-typical-human-speech recitation speeds. The same goes for typing being faster then dictation
- Screens and keyboards afford a minimal level of privacy. With them eavesdropping generally requires line of site, not just sitting in the next cubicle over and unavoidably hearing everything
So, where will this be useful? Anywhere keyboards aren't. Web phones. Industrial environments (well, quiet ones). For physically challenged folks with visual or manual problems. But sitting in the typical office workspace? Not gonna (still) revolutionize the world.I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
You could talk to it but it could not talk to you. OS/2 v4 would let you navigate through applications by voice commands. You could access any menu in an app using voice macros that you could record and add to the app in its settings notebook. The design and the implementation of the voice-navigation macros were brilliant and far ahead of their time but the system never worked very well because it was simply too slow on the Pentium cpus available when it was released in 1996. Also, IBM hard-coded some cpu limitations into the implementation such that it still ran at exactly the same speed years later on a 2.0 Ghz cpu as it did on a 133 Mhz cpu. I used to use the voice navigation to do simple things, though, like enter numbers into spreadsheets and it was fine for that. IBM took the voice navigation out of OS/2 beginning with v4.51.
In fact, quite a few of us have been doing this for some time. What you are reading was dictated using NaturallySpeaking, the speech recognition software the majority use who must (or prefer to) do some or all functions on the computer by voice. Well, "Put in the CD!", doesn't quite work but I can dictate very quickly and I can control everything within Mozilla (and Windows) by voice commands.
I applaud the folks at Opera for their efforts. While a truly user-friendly speaker-independent voice interface for all computers is still a while off, it is the future and in the meantime providing the basic functionality of being able to control things like your Web browser by voice commands benefits many. Some will just find it fun to play with, of course, but others will find it truly useful and for some, like me, it is indispensable; I'm a quadriplegic and have used voice/speech recognition since the 486 days.
Opera and Mozilla are excellent choices and both provide different approaches to accessibility, making one the better choice for some than the other (having choice is great!) but here's a bit of irony -- Internet Explorer is the one directly supported by NaturallySpeaking but while I would prefer Mozilla in any case, Mozilla actually works better for me using speech recognition.
Now, if only we could get speech recognition working well natively in Linux...
[Dictated using speech recognition technology. There may be air oars]
Ah, but I use mouse gestures with Firefox every day! There are extensions that add this funcionality. Go to http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/ and look at the "Mouse gestures" section. I personally use Radial Context -- it's basically mouse gestures w/ a GUI that helps you remember little-used commands.
Exactly what was a lie? In 1996, IBM released OS/2 Warp 4 which included a voice enabled version of Netscape Navigator. Here is the press release.
4 .h tml
http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease22
The voice recognition was OK, and it was quite easy to navigate from website to website using bookmarks and links in the page.
-Jim
It's okay. Opera lets you suppress those annoying automated audio clips. Hit F12 (opens the Quick Preferences menu) and uncheck 'Enable embedded audio'.
The same menu also contains all the popup killing settings ('Open requested popups only' works quite well) and cripple some other annoyances of the web (uncheck 'Enable plugins' and possibly 'Enable Javascript'.)
Cheers.
~Idarubicin