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.

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.

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.

Today on the WWW:

• Nuance announces voice search framework, based on directory assistance solutions portfolio.
• Epson releases speech synthesis chip, powered by Fonix engine, allows mixed output of synthesis and pre-recorded speech.
• Loquendo text-to-speech gives speech to Activa Multimedia iVAC avatars.

On the WWW today:

• Rogers Wireless Canada and Nuance parter for mobile services.
• across Systems unveils localization and translation web-client software.
• Nuance Focus acquisition closes.
• Genesys launches multi-modal voice and video plattform.
• DMG Consulting publishes speech analytics report, predicts huge growth and improved call center QA.

On the WWW today:

• Article about Google statistical machine translation algorithms, mentions success in Arabic (cf. NIST benchmarks finding Google’s Arabic/Chinese->English translation most accuracte.)
• Teragram MyGAD.com search engine launch, employing NLP for improved information retrieval. In related news, a list of top-100 search engines, including more NLP and some audio searches.
• Article about predicive software application for the tourism industry, calls for NLP and other AI techniques such as neural networks.
• Nuance unveils voice music search application for mobile ASR applications. In related news, Nuance ships improved mobile TTS.

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.