Dragon NaturallySpeaking Included in New Learning Access Suite to Aid Students with Learning Difficulties

Nuance Communications has today announced that Dragon® NaturallySpeaking® features in the Learning Access Suite, a collection of powerful learning tools designed to make reading, writing and learning much easier. Developed in conjunction with major assistive solution providers Claro Software and Microlink PC, the Learning Access Suite is available immediately for as little as £1.10 per pupil. [click heading for more]

Speak2Me Successfully Completes Tests of Its Online Service

Speak2Me Inc. has successfully completed beta tests of its online service for conversational English at three Beijing universities.
These beta tests, with students at Capital Normal University, Beijing Union University and the National Geology University, bring Speak2Me one step closer to a full scale China-wide rollout of the commercial version of its online service for English language learners. [click heading for more]

Welsh language-technology gets global recognition

TECHNOLOGY aimed at helping businesses use the Welsh language has been so successful it is being copied as far afield as China and Sri Lanka.
A small team at Canolfan Bedwyr, a unit at Bangor University, has for several years been creating Welsh-language computer spell-checkers, screen readers and synthetic voices.

The unit – which brings together linguists and IT experts – also creates generic computer tools that can be adapted for use in other languages.
The centre’s model for standardising technical terms was borrowed recently by the Chinese government when it introduced new legislation. [click heading for more]

How Things Work: Speech Recognition

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” said Arthur C. Clarke, renowned science fiction author of the 20th century — and even today, we see the truth of this statement everywhere before our eyes.
“Open Sesame!” chanted Aladdin to open the treasure cavern of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. Today, we deal with much the same in our daily lives — from phones that dial numbers at the sound of a name, to automated voice-menus in various phone services, voice recognition is a little bit of magic that technology has introduced into our lives.
Voice recognition, however, is a far more tricky business than it sounds. If even real-life, human students have trouble understanding professors’ thick accents, what hope do machines have in this regard? [click heading for more]

What is VoiceXML?

VoiceXML (VXML) is the W3C's standard XML format for specifying interactive voice dialogues between a human and a computer. It is fully analogous to HTML, and brings the same advantages of web application development and deployment to voice applications that HTML brings to visual applications. Just as HTML documents are interpreted by a visual web browser, VoiceXML documents are interpreted by a voice browser. A common architecture is to deploy banks of voice browsers attached to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) so that users can simply pick up a phone to interact with voice applications. [click heading for more]

Help learning English pronunciation

Carnegie Speech Co. has developed interactive software it says can improve English spoken-language skills by pinpointing pronunciation errors and giving suggestions as to how to correct them. The software uses speech-recognition and artificial-intelligence technology to detect errors in sound, rhythm and pitch. Users of the NativeAccent software speak into a computer microphone and then are corrected while listening to themselves and a native speaker pronounce the same words. [click heading for more]

Soliloquy Learning Revamps Soliloquy Reading Assistant

Soliloquy Learning, Inc. has updated its signature program, Soliloquy Reading Assistant, which combines advanced speech recognition technology with scientifically-based interventions to help elementary and secondary students strengthen their reading fluency, vocabulary and comprehension skills.