Zabaware Wins Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence

It is one thing to talk to your computer it is quite another to have a conversation where you are exchanging information and the computer learns and utilizes the information in the future. Zabaware’s Ultra Hal technology and its associated brain are currently doing just that. The software can give your computer a personality using AI technology, speech recognition technology, and real-time animation. It can be used as an entertainment program, a companion, or an office assistant. It learns from conversations and evolves and improves the more it talks with a person. In addition to chat it can perform useful functions such as remembering and reminding of appointments, keeping an address book, dialing phone numbers, launching program, and more.

Try these on for size: Wearable computers -

Overall, "wearables represent a niche industrial and government market where freeing one's hands significantly enhances the capabilities of the user," said David Krebs, an analyst at Venture Development Corp. in Natick, Mass. "We have seen strong successes in warehouses and some in the military for situational awareness, with some adoption in health care and maintenance. But the big issue in the field is identifying appropriate applications."
Most wearables use speech for both input and output, he indicated. The reliability of speech recognition for input isn't a problem, because the voice software is "trained" to recognize a specific user, and the applications generally have vocabularies of less than 100 words, sources said.

Save Time and Hassle with Voicemail to E-Mail Apps - Webworker Daily

Do you control your voicemail or does it control you? If you’re like a lot of people, you often find yourself listening to long-winded messages one after another, get frustrated when people don’t get to the point, or don’t make clear why you should call them back. There are some good solutions available that can put you in much more control of your voicemail...

October 2007 Early Indications II: Ten big technology-related busts in the past ten years

Ever since at least 1997, Bill Gates has been predicting that speech recognition will be an integral aspect of the PC experience. In his 5-to-10-year timeframe, it never happened, but not for lack of trying: Dragon Systems, headquartered in the U.S., was losing money selling speech recognition software before it was bought by Belgian competitor Lernout & Hauspie in the spring of 2000, just after L&H paid $1 billion for Dictaphone. The Dragon founders, however, had the misfortune of watching their company go into reorganization after accounting irregularities made the L&H stock worthless.

ScanSoft, which made optical character recognition products, bought the assets, but even now, neither Nuance (as ScanSoft renamed itself) nor Microsoft has made speech interfaces work for general-purpose computing. In vertical domains, however, speech interfaces -- particularly telephonic customer service and medical transcription -- are working well.

Going Backwards - custom speech applications can create more problems than they solve...

Here's some opinion from the Fluency blog. Really, it's nothing new - the simple message is that speech systems do not replace human beings, they complement them. The skill in deploying speech systems is in knowing how to achieve and optimise this balance. For your self-service systems to work with you, not against you. (This is of course where Vicorp has particular expertise, but then I would say that.)

While custom-built speech applications allow companies to tailor the solutions to their exact requirements, they also provide unlimited scope to steer customers away from real, human interaction – the primary reason many people choose to try their luck at getting through to phone-based contact centers, rather than defer to Web FAQs and email!

To put too many hurdles between the caller and the agent is to tamper precariously with customer relations. This has become such a problem already that US consumer champion Paul English’s ‘Gethuman’ online database takes great pleasure in instructing customers how to bypass particular companies’ automation systems so they can get to speak to a live agent!

Speech recognition technology should be harnessed strategically and selectively, to facilitate better agent response, rather than replace it. Applied thoughtfully, it can transform the entire operation, boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty, and even driving up revenues as a proportion of call time is subtly refocused on upselling.

IT priorities in Healthcare

Speech recognition is on the list of technologies that survey respondents intend to implement in the next two years, although Intranet and high-speed networks have become the number one priorities.

Distracted driving contest reveals the obvious....

Nuance, makers of speech recognition technology for mobile phones held a contest in Florida to see just how dangerous a distracted, SMS texting driver was, compared to a driver using Nuance’s speech recognition technology.
Turns out, drivers tasked with sending a short SMS text message, looking up a local business, and playing an MP3 file - tasks typically associated with “driving while mobile” - repeatedly crashed. Those drivers using Nuance software-equipped mobile phones were able to carry out the tasks with nary a crash.

Google's VP of Search Products on Speech Recognition

You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG411 service. Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.
The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. ... So 1-800-GOOG411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.

Transcend finds Speech Recognition really does deliver productivity improvements (forbes.com)

The company attributed the improvement to productivity gains thanks to speech recognition technology and the use of offshore transcription resources. The Atlanta medical transcription services company said about 24% of its total production volume was 'edited using speech recognition technology in the third quarter.'

Fluency and Message Technologies Join to Bring Speech Self-Service to North American Customers

Fluency Voice Technology (News - Alert) has partnered with Message Technologies, Inc. to now also make hosted speech self-service available to North American customers.