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The Future of Speech Technologies
prostoalex writes "PC Magazine is running an interview with two of the research leaders in IBM's speech recognition group, Dr. David Nahamoo, manager of Human Language Technologies, and Dr. Roberto Sicconi, manager of Multimodal Conversational Solutions. They mainly discuss the status quo of speech technologies, which prototypes exist in IBM Labs today, and where the industry is headed." From the article: "There has to be a good reason to use speech, maybe you're hands are full [like in the case of driving a car]. ... Speech has to be important enough to justify the adoption. I'd like to go back to one of your original questions. You were saying, 'What's wrong with speech recognition today?' One of the things I see missing is feedback. In most cases, conversations are one-way. When you talk to a device, it's like talking to a 1 or 2 year old child. He can't tell you what's wrong, and you just wait for the time when he can tell you what he wants or what he needs."
I have a solution to the "one-way" communication problem.
More popups.
Audio popups!
Heads-up display popups!
Holy blackberries! Get me my patent attorney!
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"
I've been waiting for years for speach recognition technology to get to an acceptable standard and over that time I've used a couple, the one i got lately (dragonsoft I think) was ok, but they need to come quite a bit further before I'll be adopting all the way.
I'm looking forward to when I can say "computer, open openoffice for me mate" and it'll go "sure"... That'll be sweet.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
What's wrong with speech recognition today?
I took a brief poll, and nobody seems to have a problem:
Bruce: I sure like being inside this fancy computer.
Vicki: Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?
Agnes: Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?
Kathy: Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?
Except the trinoids, who complained:
We can not communicate with these carbon units.
I wasn't sure which Carbon they were talking about.
The present of speech technology already does, and did so for years. One problem is that you don't have a huge enough word corpus for training that technology (the knowledge of context is always limited to the domain that you have been training it against).
I'm a linguist, and it seems to me that Speech Recognition would be incredibly, incredibly useful in the research that's going on right now into Language Acquisition.
You see, the problem right now is that there's really not much data that's in the public domain for linguists/psychologists/what-have-you to study, because it's incredibly, incredibly laborious to do longitudinal studies of children's utterances, or of input to the child. People spend hours and hours and hours transcribing 20 minutes of tape. They're understandably reticent to just share their data out of the goodness of their hearts. Even when they do, it's never a large sampling of children-and-their-interlocutors from-birth-to-age-X, it's usually just one child and maybe his or her parents from age 8 months to 3 years.
So we have arguments about whether or not kids hear certain forms of input (Have you used passive voice with your child recently? Where's your child going to learn subjacency?) that go back and forth between psychologists and linguists, and people perform corpus studies on 3 children and feel that that's representative -- never mind the fact that these three kids were all harvested from the MIT daycare centre, and were the children of grad students or faculty members, and thus may not be representative of the population at large.
Speech recognition would make it much, much easier to amass large corpora of data for larger samples of the population. It'd make it much more likely for people to share their data. And, what's more, it'd likely be possible to have a phonetic and syntactic-word-stub (for lack of a better word) transcription made from the same recording. We'd have a better idea of how the input determines how language is acquired by children, and what sorts of stages children go through.
Scansoft, who earlier all but cornered the market for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, did the same with speech recognition by acquiring the largest players in this space, SpeechWorks and Nuance. Scansoft changed their name to Nuance as a part of that last acquisition.
IBM, meanwhile, has been struggling to find a market for their "Superhuman" (sneer) speech reco technology. A few years ago, they sold distribution of their retail desktop product, ViaVoice, to (wait for it) Scansoft. Their commercial product was RS/6000-AIX-only until a couple of years ago, when they ported it to more platforms, including Windows and Linux, and integrated it more tightly with their Rational and WebSphere marketing platforms.
The current enterprise product sounds really sexy, at least for Rational-WebSphere shops. You can develop your WebSphere VXML application in Eclipse and leverage all those groovy WebSphere services you've built. No (or not much) special skill required!
The problem is that their target market is Telecom Managers, who face a choice between IBM, with a few hundred ports installed, and Nuance (-ScanSoft-SpeechWorks), with tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of installed speech reco ports. Telecom Managers live in a world where their clients expect six-sigma/five-nines reliability. This is a hard sell to make.
The question is, how long can IBM keep pouring money into speech R&D and product development in the face of dismal sales? Some in the industry expect the answer is, "Not too much longer." And that. of course, makes nervous enterprise buyers even more nervous and less likely to buy.
personally, i can't wait till they take speech recognition and couple it with natural language processing as a standard part of the desktop interface. it should be quite feasible now that we're seeing affordable 64-bit computing with fast memory and bus speeds. imagine excel with a speech-recognition interface, so instead of typing and filling formulae you would just tell it to "sum the row labeled timing, but only include values greater than 10". ok, back to work...
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
A few years ago my wife was thinking about studying to become a court reporter. The training is very demanding, and I heard the dropout rate is about 95%, but the pay is good if not great.
In any case, I warned her about the potential for voice recognition technology to render court reporters obsolete. It probably won't happen, but the mere prospect tipped her in the direction of foregoing the opportunity. Was that a mistake?
The same concern applies also to medical transcription.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
Try TellMe. Call 1-800-555-TELL. It's a voice portal. Buy movie tickets. Get driving directions. News, weather, stock quotes, and sports. All without looking at the phone. So what's the problem?
Doctors in Finland are starting to use speech recognition to update patient records. I think it is in testing at the moment, check the following link for details.
1 6080;163;9862
http://www.tietoenator.com/default.asp?path=1;93;
speech recognition
O /software.htmlc h/software/
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/
image+speech recognition
http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/
Desktop voice commands
http://perlbox.sourceforge.net/
Others
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Speech-Recognition-HOWT
http://www.cavs.msstate.edu/hse/ies/projects/spee
Do you know about other usable open source speech solutions?