Okko in Speech

There was no shortage of novel uses for speech technology this week. Avaya and the Jersey City’s Liberty Science Center announced speech-enabled exhibits, allowing customers to access information and services in the museum using their voice (and, of course, mobile devices).
Gizmo freaks should love (and everyone else should hate) this bunny, displaying speech recognition and synthesis, while also providing some unified communication capacities.
Also novel, though on a sadder note: speech is finally on the malware radar for good, as TTS trojans popped up using Microsoft’s builtin text-to-speech engine to annoy users by commenting their own malicious behavior. Call it the salt-in-wound virus. This news comes after about half a year after a MS Vista speech recognition security flaw was revealed, whereby the recognizer enables remote execution of content on a computer running speech recognition.

Traditional speech applications made some headlines this week as well: Nuance signs deal with Damovo to roll out speech apps in Ireland, forecasting €1.5m in profits over the next year. TuVox annouces hosted on-demand speech apps for VOIP access.

Lastly, here is an interesting article about the Jetsons and why speech technology hasn’t caught on as much as we have all hoped.

Slow week in terms of language technology news.
On the gaming front: Nintendo announced they were playing the middleware game for Wii development by opening up the platform to 3rd party technologies. Among the first to sign on was Fonix, allowing game developers to integrate VoiceIn Game edition, their video game console speech recognition and “karaoke” SDK. The karaoke feature seems rather gimmicky, geared only at the karaoke gaming genre, which seems rather niche. Fonix has displayed strong focus on gaming in the past, integrating as Sony PS3 middleware.
Unfortunately, speech in games has never made a big splash, but it represents a refreshing move away from customer service applications. Perhaps the middleware approach of many platform vendors will change things.
Talking about the customer service front: Genesys and Merced Systems team to develop improved reporting tools. Measuring and reporting customer service interaction has made headway recently. Focus on interaction effectiveness of natural language/speech applications intends to help correct some of the poor image that self-service applications live with. Relatedly, this article describes the shortcomings of such applications in the past and proposes a less-is-more, faster interaction paradigm for interactive voice response applications. While not all problems with IVR applications boil down to complicated menu structures and long response times, this is certainly a pointer in the right direction, placing emphasis on dialogue design rather than engineering.
Lastly, showing that not all speech communications is simply about customer service, Voxeo snags Gartners “Cool Vendors in Enterprise Communications, 2007” title, awarded to companies for being among the “interesting, new and innovative”.

So the big news this week is Nuance’s acquisition of the month: Tegic. Tegic supplies T9 predictive text input to several mobile phone manufacturers. The acquisition represents Nuance’s recent focus on acquiring mobile technology market companies. It serves Nuance with a strategic customer base, including obvious candidates for Nuance’s speech technologies. Aside from the strategic benefits, the technical result of mixing predictive text input with speech is interesting and something to be followed.
Coincidentally, the woes and comeback of using speech for I/O on mobile devices are described in these articles this week.
Lastly here is an interesting interview with Lin Chase, director of Accenture R&D in Bangalore, India, who held several prominent positions in the speech tech industry in the past. Topics include speech, women in the industry and why Americans should travel.

…these are the three overarching themes of the speech technology news that I came across this week. There are some obvious and less obvious points of contact here:

• In the Army: for those who watched Air Wolf in the 80s, voice-controlled aircraft systems are being tested on UK Army helicopters.
• Healthcare-military solution of the week: US Army hospital deploys speech enabled self-service telephone application.
• Some pure healthcare: UK study finds outlook on radiological reporting using speech recognition positive. Also, Bayer employs MedScan NLP technology for information extraction of biomedical literature.
• Three security applications of language technology his week: a password reset application employing speaker verification wins award, a Brazilian bank looking to employ SV for financial services applications and a university campus emergency response system using speech synthesis.

Many of those working in speech recognition, especially deploying customer-service telephone application, have grown tired the limited scope that most projects entail. I recently wrote about speech enabled knowledge bases as a novel type of speech app. In what may be another – at least I haven’t heard this before – MTI and FasTrak Retail combine efforts to launch a ‘virtual sales associates‘ platform. And of course there are the recurring dreams of voice enabled video gaming.

Speech synthesis is naturally more diverse than its recognition sibling (perhaps not everything ‘I’ in I/O can be channelled through voice, but pretty much everything ‘O’ can be synthesized.) In todays news, TTS is employed in emergency response systems to broadcast text messages as audio.

Lastly, speech got some rep in the Economist June 7th issue.

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.

Today, I came across some novel(ish) uses for text-to-speech:

• Security: Campus emergency notification system employs TTS for playback of notifications, sent to student/staff phones.
• Accessibility: ‘Seeingeyephone’ NFC application reads product information to users

On the mainstream speech recognition front:

• Voxeo releases new developer packages, claiming improved internationalization, availability.
• As a reminder of a sadder hour of the industry, Lernout and Houspie goes on trial this week.

And some Web3.0 language tech news:

• This week at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose…

Ok, I’m back from vacation and finally sorted through some of the recent developments in the speech world. Going forward I will probably post longer but less frequent tidbits here.

Biggest recent speech news is the acquisition of VoiceSignals, broadening their mobile end user market as well as adding some nifty voice features in short messaging and mobile phone usability.
On related news, here is a short article describing the role of speech in unified messaging.
Lastly, here is a description of progress on open-source telephony and speech recognition.

Two articles and a product showcase recently demonstrated speech-enabled knowledge base solutions. In essence products/solutions such as this are expert systems with various degrees of complexity, ranging from speaking manuals to complex diagnosis systems. Users can describe a problem and ultimately receive an answer, whether through complex one-shot natural language processing/understanding or a plain-old, multi-step directed dialogue.
Alongside traditional call-center automation applications – e.g. customer service, process automation, pre-qualification, directory assistance – these systems represent a minor market segment. However they are relatively novel, so much can still happen. Especially in medical/health care domains, the market appears untapped and the list of potential applications broad.

On the WWW today:

• Company provides podcast of printed news using synthesised speech.
• White-paper about benefits of speech recognition in the retail market.