Okko in Speech

On the WWW today:

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

On the WWW today:

• Some recent news about Google and MS voice search offensive.
• Epson chip to feature Fonix DECtalk speech synthesis.

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.

Today on the WWW:

• Haley 6.0, a business rules management system, allows business rules extraction using natural language processing.
• Uses of voice-enabled wikis.

On the WWW today:

• Wizzard provides new Skype extra for contact list management, featuring custom TTS announcemens and alerts.
• TransClick and ChatStats provide on-the-fly translation of IM chats.

Daily News Redux:

• Some electronic dictionary news. Coolsoft Coolexon electronic dictionary features 60 languages, including translation and TTS accessibility features, is only 3.3MB large. Also in the news, Ultralingua and Collins partner to release electronic dictionaries.
• Some business automation success stories using speech recognition.
• Some more semantic search engine-related news featuring ZoomInfo and Cognition.
• Arab language speech recognition market growing.
• Wizzard announces 2006 financial results.

Questions of the day:

• Web X.0 IEEE workshop. What role will NLP play?
• Are GPS navigation systems driving the TTS market (links randomly chosen from recent navigation system releases)?

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.

On the WWW today:

• Gamasutra reports Fonix earnings. Fonix ASR engine recently received attention after integration on various gaming platforms.
• Wireless Linux penguin robot features Acapela TTS.
• Genesys and Avaya make more news on the multi-modal voice service plattforms featuring video support.

Have a good weekend!

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.