JetBlue dials in to Microsoft's speech-recognition technology

A recent move by JetBlue is allowing the airline's passengers to retrieve flight information with a voice-activated interface when they call in. It's a simple scenario that most of us are familiar with: You call a toll-free number, speak the flight numbers, arrival and departure cities, and flight times, and you are provided with the information you need. The headlines from a recent Webinar regarding JetBlue's phone changes show the affordability side: "How JetBlue is Replacing their $1,000 Speech Recognition Licenses for $15".

So where does Microsoft come into play on all of this? Well, there are usually steep costs involved with speech recognition. Aumtech, however, collaborated with Microsoft to leverage the speech recognition services built into Office and Vista, resulting in a lower-cost solution. By lower cost, I mean 75 percent lower than competitively placed solutions, according to some accounts.

Here are some of the numbers: When JetBlue wanted to increase its existing Philips/Nuance ASR application license (which had an 88 percent accuracy rate and 60 percent call completion rate), the airline was looking at a price tag of $175,000. Aumtech said it could do it better and for less, $47,500. JetBlue says the system now has an accuracy rate of 90 percent and call completions are at 82 percent with the capability to handle three times the call volume than the previous system. .

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blinkx Named "Star Performer" by Speech Technology Magazine

blinkx today announced that it has been named a winner of Speech Technology magazine's 2008 Speech Industry Awards in the "Star Performers" category. Awards are presented to individuals and companies for extraordinary efforts made to increase benefits, acceptance and adoption of speech technologies and for outstanding accomplishments in bringing new products and services to the marketplace. The awards were presented recently at the 14th Annual SpeechTEK Conference and Exposition in New York City. [click heading for more]

Openstream launches mobile speech-recognition platform

Mobile Internet infrastructure platform and applications provider Openstream Inc. has launched a multimodal mobile browser with speech-recognition capability called Cue-me.
Built on open standards, Openstream's Cue-me browser enables multimodal mobile application development for various handsets such as Windows Mobile, Symbian and BlackBerry platforms. Cue-me provides an alternative to the small-keypad mode of interaction. [click heading for more]

Virtual healthcare system makes house calls

Four months go by, on average, between scheduled checkups for patients with chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity and hypertension. A lot can happen between visits, and researchers at Boston Medical Center are pioneering ways to stay virtually connected with patients so that any healthcare issues can be addressed without delay.
The goal is to provide guidance and information when patients need it, during their daily lives and not just during scheduled doctor visits, says Robert Friedman, a physician and head of a team at Boston Medical Center that's developing telephone-based systems for delivering virtual care. [click heading for more]

Wonder why everything isn't speech controlled?

[nik's note: this is not my opinion, but that of the original author]

I don't really care that American Airlines can recognize my voice responses on the phone. The only speech application that actually benefits me on a day-to-day basis is on my cell phone, and that's pretty basic stuff.
For the most part, we're still banging away on computer keyboards and drowning in a sea of proprietary consumer electronics devices and remote controls.

Courtesy of dozens of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) over the past 13 years, Nuance now owns much of the speech technology on planet Earth. The company boasts a $3.5 billion market cap on annual sales that will likely top $800 million this fiscal year but, remarkably, has never been profitable. I can see why. Nuance has been so busy acquiring companies it hasn't had a chance to worry about a little thing like profitability. The company's history is a tribute to M&A gluttony.

The fact that the company says little about aggressively driving its technology into the consumer space is telling. That's simply not its business plan, and I can certainly understand why. The consumer electronics market is highly fragmented with thin margins and high support costs. And if Nuance wishes to avoid that, well, there really isn't much competition left to twist its arm.

Still, the next time you get off the phone with an automated call-center that communicates eerily well, only to fumble around with the myriad of keyboards, buttons, and remote controls in your own life, at least you'll know what name to curse: Nuance Communications.

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Speech recognition firm finds its voice

Telephonetics, the speech recognition and voice automation specialist, returned to the black in the first half to May 31, with operating profits of £414,000 compared with a previous loss of £26,000. While revenue from cinema chains is falling, the company is building a customer base in NHS Trusts, local authorities and housing associations. [click heading for more]

The Case For Speech-to-Text Analysis In Multimedia Content Discovery

When thinking about the relevance of speech-to-text in a content discovery setting, it’s important to understand how multimedia content is currently discovered online. According to hitwise, between April 2007 and April 2008 the paradigm for multimedia content discovery has shifted significantly in favor of search engines. Why the shift? This can be explained primarily by two factors. The first is that the audience that consumes online multimedia continues to grow in terms of size and amount of content they consume regularly. As video consumption goes mainstream, one would expect that the web audience relies more heavily on search engines for content discovery, just as they do for text content. In fact, it’s not uncommon for web searches to have “audio” or “video” appended to their phrases to bias SERPs towards multimedia content. [click heading for more]

Nuance to acquire SnapIn

Speech recognition technology supplier Nuance Communications Inc (NUAN.O: Quote, Profile, Research) plans to buy customer service technology supplier SNAPin for $180 million in an all stock deal that lets it cash in on growing demand from mobile operators for more automated customer service options.

Vicorp wins award at SpeechTEK for its professional services

UK based Vicorp is pleased to announce that it has won the Best Professional Services category of the Speech Solution Awards at SpeechTEK 2008.
"We are delighted with our award," says Lee Cottle, COO at Vicorp. "We have been recognised in the past for our award-winning service creation and execution environment, xMP, but this is the first award for our professional services and is testament to the excellent work our team produces for our customers." [click heading for more]

Voxpilot Partners With Cepstral to Offer Affordable Quality Text-to-Speech Voices

Cepstral LLC today proudly announced a partnership with Voxpilot, a leader in VoiceXML and interactive voice and video platforms. Cepstral's Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine and voices have undergone interoperability testing and Voxpilot will offer in-house support for Cepstral's server-grade TTS engine and voices.
Voxpilot integrated Cepstral's engine into the version 3.4 release of their premiere product, Voxpilot Open Media Platform. Customers of the Voxpilot Open Media Platform can now reach enterprise-level scale for their speech needs including spoken alerts, auto-attendant, and notifications more affordably using Cepstral's high quality TTS voices. [click heading for more]