Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

IBM Develops Technology To Talk To Web

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the dr-spaetzo-gets-a-job dept.

ProgramErgoSum writes to tell us that IBM's Indian-based research arm is trying to bring a new dimension to web interaction through voice interaction on your mobile phone. Developing a new protocol, Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP), the hope is to allow users to talk to the web and get a response. Without more explanation I'm hoping this goes about as far as the gopher web. "The spoken web is a network of voice sites or interconnected voice and the response the company got in some pilot projects in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat and the kind of innovations that people came up with were just mind-boggling, Gupta said. "

4 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting... by rockNme2349 · · Score: 2, Informative

    but unnecessary. Instead of trying to create a new standard, what's wrong with sending an http request, and receiving an rtp response. Let the device do the text-to-speech conversion, like they do already.

    I just can't imagine an entirely new protocol being adopted when it is already very possible using existing technologies...

    --
    Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
    1. Re:Interesting... by CarpetShark · · Score: 3, Informative

      Agreed. Especially since CSS has supported aural media (including multiple voices or generic speaker categories like "child", "male", "female" for different speakers in a story, for instance) for quite a while now.

    2. Re:Interesting... by CarpetShark · · Score: 3, Informative

      There's a good (and recent) summary of the situation here:

      http://lab.dotjay.co.uk/notes/css/aural-speech/

      If you want an open source solution, you should probably look to the firevox (as opposed to firefox etc.) community. Otherwise, Opera is probably your best bet. As far as usage goes: I think it's still pretty limited, but definitely worth considering for future projects that need (or can benefit from) such features, rather than some proprietary solution. Especially since it's a relatively small amount of extra work that can be overlaid onto existing web pages.

    3. Re:Interesting... by Hurricane78 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Which is a rule, but which is very very stupid, and just looks wrong to every human I have ever asked anyway. So fix your rules already. I have.

      --
      Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.