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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'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"
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.
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.