www.getdesign.in - My periodic blog exploring the world of business, experience design and interaction, with a smattering of gadgetry and social media. A world where business, people and technology meet.
Let's Fix Things: For over two decades I've been consulting in Communications Design: Everything from business strategy and processes, through to technology, interaction and customer experience. The thoughts here are my own, not necessarily that of my employer.
I have a penchant for spotting patterns and fixing broken user and customer experiences. Even my Bumblebee project hasn't escaped - I've been using Six Sigma techniques to study and predict their behaviour patterns. ☺
France-based Telisma has launched automatic speech recognition (ASR) software called 'teliSpeech' in ten Indian languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, and Punjabi.
Intervoice, Inc. (NASDAQ:INTV) today announced that Contact Solutions has selected Intervoice Voice Portal, a VoiceXML platform, to host voice and speech applications for its customers. This signifies an expansion of the Companies’ existing strategic relationship. Contact Solutions currently hosts thousands of ports of Intervoice’s IVR technology to service their growing customer base. As part of this announcement, the two companies have agreed to market the joint solution to existing and new customers interested in shared IVR and Voice Portal services.
Frost & Sullivan has recognized Tellme, a Microsoft subsidiary, with the 2007 North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Line Strategy.
The Award acknowledges Tellme's excellence in the development and deployment of large volume voice services and platform solutions to its brand name customers.
Hosted IVR solutions have presented a compelling and cost-effective alternative to on-premise based solutions for the past couple of years. Significant reductions in upfront capital expenditures and maintenance costs, combined with flexibility and agility of deployment represent some of the key drivers for rapid adoption of hosted IVR services in the market. [more...]
Telisma, a France-based company that develops speech recognition software, looks forward to collaborating with Indian firms having expertise in Text to Speech (TTS) and Text to Text (TTT) technology. The company is scouting to collaborate with Indian companies, academic institutions that can deliver capabilities - such as TTS, TTT, and translation to its existing capability of speech recognition.
The company depends highly on its partners such as Wipro, Genesys in India, Cisco, Cap Gemini, Atos Origin, and others globally, as this is the only mode through which it sells its software.
A technology that can recognise anxiety in people is being developed by an Australian computer scientist. Changes in speech rhythm and pitch and any quavering in the voice are picked up by speech recognition software.
Lifetime Health Medical Group, a non-profit primary care delivery system based in Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y., has integrated Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical 9 with its EMR system. Lifetime Health Medical said Dragon eliminates physician reliance on data entry through the keyboard. "Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical allows healthcare provider organizations and patients to enjoy the enhancements in care associated with electronic medical records while providing physicians a comfortable and natural way to operate EMR systems," said Peter Durlach, senior vice president, healthcare marketing and product strategy for Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance.
[Health Imaging News]
The following article acts as a good basic primer for anyone discovering speech recognition for the first time (be it on their personal computer, or down the end of the phone). (Follow the linked heading for the full article).
For those of us who used typewriters with whiteout or eraser ribbons - we can only dream of what our past might have been! All those 30 page papers I had to do at college would not have seemed so daunting, if I would have had speech software back then. But I suspect that the long history of speech recognition software is still news to most people (and professors) today. I had an interesting discussion with an English teacher who watched a demonstration of speech. Like the calculator has been to arithmetic, this teacher was sure that speech recognition would ruin the written language. Perhaps. Or maybe it is just a return to a more ancient form - the oral tradition.
Of the many types of users of speech recognition today - most are in the words business. They are people who use extensive numbers of words in their profession. So it is lawyers, physicians, judges and educators who tend to be the early adopters. Most of them were already used to dictation so the idea of speaking their thoughts was already comfortable. Other categories are executives who want to be able to control their personal email dictation. People with disabilities that limit their ability to use the computer keyboard or mouse have also found speech as their way to surf the web, play games, send email or do their work. It is liberating.
VoiceXML powers a variety of mission-critical and business-critical applications fromc ustomer care, directory assistance, telematics and unified messaging. It is estimated that more than 10,000 commercial VoiceXML-based speech applications have been deployed worldwide across a diverse set of industries. This paper will outline Avaya's view on VoiceXML and how it plays a lead role in the emerging trend of more open, intelligent communications solutions.
Although cell phones are ubiquitous, only limited numbers of individuals use them to surf the mobile Web. Whereas the keyboard interface with a cell phone is far from ideal, the cell phone is designed expressly to handle sound. In parts of the developing world, the cell phone will be the only device that many will use to surf the mobile web. The huge potential of these developing world markets will well justify the investment needed to develop strong voice recognition systems....
It is quite clear that these three companies [Nuance, Microsoft, Google] are highly attracted by the potential of the sound-based mobile Web. Their competitive efforts to gain the lion’s share will certainly boost the rate of growth of this marketplace... [more >>>]
A true Apple fanatic will tell you that everything your Windows machine can do, Apple did first or does better. The worst part: The fanatic is often right.
But when it comes to speech recognition, Microsoft is way out front. Microsoft shipped Windows Vista to consumers last January with a heavy-duty voice recognition system that allows it to do far more than just recognize simple voice commands--as Leopard does. Sure, it's hardly perfect...
But, when it works, the ambitious effort also allows users to dictate entire documents. And Microsoft is building speech recognition into more than just computers. Ford's new Sync system, built with help from Microsoft, gives drivers the ability to control their electronics and even dictate text messages from the driver's seat. It is part of an effort by Microsoft to extend its software far beyond the desktop.
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