Okko in Speech

Arstechnica reports today on the release of Microsoft Recite “Technology Preview” for Windows Mobile. The applications lets users record short notes as audio snippets, which can later be searched for content by speaking key words. Apparently it does not entail speech recognition rather than simpler pattern matching, meaning it cannot be searched in text form but may work more robustly, eliminating the effort of training for speaker-independency.

While not a full product yet, this sounds like a nifty little application for cognitive off-loading.

Have you tried Microsoft Recite?

A no-frills phone with the unlikely name of Zumba Lumba has recently received some attention by the BBC. The phone is said to be top-secret, developed by a defense-aviation company. It does without frills like a camera or an applications platform, but touts some interesting security and computational features, (not only) related to speech technology:

• Cloud computing – the phone uses no local storage for contacts, data.
• Network speech recognition – user input is recognized over the internet. This should avoid hardware intensive local computing for voice input, but requires internet access.
• Voice identification – enhanced security, because the phone will only respond to a single user’s voice.

Some seem to think this is a potential iPhone killer at least in terms of making use of innovative input modalities (though Google already released a speech recognition app for the iPhone.) Others simply thinks it’s a hoax.

Either way, the idea of joining mobile with cloud computing is interesting. Using voice identification for security has its appeal as well, even if it’s unclear whether keeping data in the cloud and sending voice data over the internet is any more secure than simply keeping data on your phone, locally.

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.

Today on the WWW:

• Several embedded TTS news articles, including accessibility, navigation and usability features.
• LingvoSoft announce web-based translation services, including readback of translation using TTS.

On the WWW today:

• LumenVox announces 400th Asterisk PBX developer employing LumenVox ASR Engine.
• VoiceSignal announces Blackberry 8800 integration.
• Talking Technologies announce real-time speech-to-speech translation software.
• Microsoft PBX with ASR. News seems older, and subsequent of MS’s TellMe acquisition.