Okko in Speech

Back after an extensive break. Been working hard on some of my own multi-modal ideas. Keep your eyes peeled.
Looks like it’s been a quiet fall, speech and language technology-wise. After GOOG-411, Microsoft has also added speech to their search engine endeavors (if in a different domain) by speech-enabling Live Search for mobile users. Nuance continues to consolidate the speech tech market.
Exciting news on the IVR front. Finally a serious attempt to integrate various open-source technologies to provide free carrier-grade speech/telephone services is under way. VoiceGlue has managed to combine OpenVXI (VXML browser), Flite (Speech Synthesis) on Asterisk and is planning to integrate Sphinx2 for speech recognition. All components would then be available under some form of the GPL. Could this herald a change in availability of speech telephone platforms for developers unwilling to dish out horrendous per-port costs? Something to follow, anyway.
Lastly, here‘s an article describing the growing role of speech in warehouse management.

Very quiet recently. No big acquisitions, no no speech-tech revolution.

Most interesting: Google announced Mike Cohen (of formerly Nuance) will appear as keynote speaker at SpeechTek in August to reveal Google’s speech technology strategy. Google has already moved into the speech application market with GOOG411, an automatic directory assistance application leveraging business search and Google Maps.
UBC researchers announce speech learning system that doesn’t use traditional data-driven model to learn the sounds of a language. Instead it is said to represent more experience driven learning, much like infants. So far, the system has acquired English and Japanese vowels.
Some product reviews/announcements: a quick history of desktop dictation, uses of TextAloud for the iPhone, and Nuance’s new South African voice “Tessa”.
Also on the web: NIST evaluates DARPA automatic translation software in military contexts, and What Semantic Search is Not.

I may post less frequently in coming weeks. Stay tuned.

There has been lot’s of German-based language technology news over the past couple of weeks:

• Ulm University in Germany and SpeechCycle parter to develop novel natural language VXML solutions.
• German semgine GmbH secures capital for improved Web3.0 applications, including market-specific, such as biomedical knowledge.
• Berlin-based Lautmaler VUI-design and speech technology experts go online.

Also some attention on language-technology-related search engine news:

• Red Herring roundup of Semantic Technology Conference last month.
• Google adds multilingual search capacity using Google Translate.
• Some speculation on whether video advertisers with enhanced NLP capacities are next in Googles acquisition cross-hairs.

Web 3.0 is getting some buzz in the blogosphere. Like Web 2.0, it begs the question that PCMag.com recently ran by its readers: what is it? However this time around things seems a bit easier.

Web 2.0 seems to be happy with being vaguely defined (delimited may be a better term) and equally a social and a technological movement. Web 3.0 clearly hovers over the idea of the “Semantic Web”, a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, in which richly mark-upped hypertext and data allow for novel more meaningful human-machine and machine-machine communication. Radar Networks (currently in stealth mode) claim to be driving some interesting developments in this direction and are followed closely by those interested.

This has already raised some questions: will content be expensive hand labor or machine boot-strappable, what new privacy policies do we have to live with, how does one separate style and content, what are alternatives to RDF.

Sadly, there’s very little inspiring out there about potential applications.

My question (though not uniquely mine) to add to this: What role will natural language processing play in this (i.e. how “semantic” is this talk of Semantics)? Semantic content in RDF appears to be little more than a means for one machine to tell another who authored a particular book or what are the postal codes in the greater Boston area. Semantics to me is as much about intentions (“Why is web-service A dispensing such information?”) and interpreting such information for the purposes of action (“What can web-service B – or my browser or I – do with it?”).

Perhaps this misses the mark and semantic really isn’t about natural language. But there is a weaker, more real form of this “language and technology” concern: Insofar as semantics is just information, can it be bootstrapped by a machine (perhaps even linguistically informed rather than statistically)?

Thoughts?

To start us off, recent experience has shown three things:

1. Speech (i.e. voice) related news is TTS-dominated, less so by ASR.
2. The company featured most frequently in the news is Nuance.
3. The talk of semantic search engines seems to dominate the NLP news.

The success of TTS is largely due to requirements set by mobile and in-car technologies, especially GPS and communications. The future of ASR in the other hand seems to depend on the dictation market (especially in the healthcare sector) and a growing relevance of network ASR (driven by advancing VoIP, impact of multi-modal applications).

Nuance’s continued position will depend on the role of “super players” IBM and Microsoft and to a lesser degree the role of open-source initiatives, especially on the network/telephony side.

Semantic search engines recently got some media hype with “Google-Killer” Powerset, a PARC offspring. While in its infancy, some believe this development towards semantic web will usher in a Web3.0 revolution. Of course, soem others believe this has already begun, while yet more just wanna see what happens with all this.

Let’s see how these trends develop. Especially multi-modality and semantic searches will be issues to follow closely.