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. ☺
The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers. [click heading for more]
A speech recognition system that can work with any English-speaking pilot, regardless of accent, is to be flight tested on Eurofighter Typhoons in Spain.
Unlike the current General Electric Aerospace direct voice input (DVI) system in the Typhoon, the new system is designed not to require specific “training” to recognize voice commands from particular pilots. Like the existing DVI, the “speaker-independent” system is designed to reduce pilot workload by executing voice control over more than 26 operating functions ranging from radar mode and display switching to various navigation tasks. [click heading for more]
Nuance Communications Inc. continued its wave of acquisitions today when it reported that it had closed its purchase of SNAPin Software, a Washington State-based developer of mobile device and server self-service technology.Burlington-based Nuance, which develops speech recognition software, had announced plans to acquire SNAPin for $180 million in August. Nuance said the SNAPin acquisition allows Nuance to enable customer support based on voice recognition and predictive text so mobile consumers can simply dial, speak or text customer care. [click heading for more]
Resolvity, Inc. announced today that its Speech Application Platform received the Speech Technology Excellence Award for 2008 presented by TMC's Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.
The Platform consists of a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence runtime, a state-of-the-art Dialog Server, in-depth management reporting, and a framework for seamless integration with call center systems. The Platform is fully standards compliant and is certified to interoperate with most popular Voice XML platforms and speech recognition engines. The Platform has been designed with a focus towards developing solutions that are complex from a customer interaction standpoint and that require frequent "near real-time" modifications to respond to constantly changing business requirements. [click heading for more]
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has terminated a loophole in California's vehicle code that banned drivers from talking on cell phones without a hands-free device but let them to communicate via text messages. The new law that takes effect on January 1, 2009 makes it illegal to drive and text at the same time. Fines start at $20 per offense. The law was partially prompted by the tragic crash of a Los Angeles commuter train in September after investigators revealed the engineer may have been distracted by text messaging before impact. California now becomes the largest state to pass such a ban on text messaging for drivers. Other states are expected to follow with similar laws. [click heading for more]
Nuance today announced that it has acquired Philips Speech Recognition Systems (PSRS). With the combined resources of Nuance and PSRS, Nuance significantly enhances its ability to deliver innovative, speech-driven clinical documentation and communication solutions to healthcare organizations throughout Europe.
Through this transaction, Nuance expands upon its mission to transform the way healthcare organizations document patient care. In recent years Nuance has targetted the estimated $10 billion spent annually for medical transcription alone. The opportunity for automated documentation solutions is also significant in Europe, where an estimated $2 billion is spent each year for manually processing clinical information and where governments have made substantial investments to digitize healthcare systems, such as the $24 billion applied to the National Health Service National Programme for IT in England. [click heading for more]
Royal Philips Electronics announced today that it has signed a global licensing agreement with Microsoft Corp. to bring industrial grade speech recognition to Microsoft’s Amalga family of enterprise healthcare solutions. Microsoft will offer Philips SpeechMagic to customers using Microsoft Amalga Hospital Information System (Amalga HIS) and Amalga RIS/PACS, with the goal of helping healthcare providers generate accurate, actionable information that is sharable, searchable and contributes to making clinical improvements. [click heading for more]
[nik's note: interesting to see the actitivy in the open source area as well as the gradual migration of speech technology to hand-held devices. How long left for speech in the network? ]
Sphinx-4 is a state-of-the-art speech recognition system written entirely in the JavaTM programming language. It was created via a joint collaboration between the Sphinx group at Carnegie Mellon University, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), and Hewlett Packard (HP), with contributions from the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Sphinx-4 started out as a port of Sphinx-3 to the Java programming language, but evolved into a recognizer designed to be much more flexible than Sphinx-3, thus becoming an excellent platform for speech research. [click heading for more]
I6NET announced today the release of VXI* 3.1. VXI* enables thousands of existing VXML applications to run on the Asterisk PBX platform, and new speech recognition solutions to be built affordably.
"The release of VXI*, powered by the LumenVox Speech Engine, allows the large pool of VXML developers to run existing speech applications on the Asterisk platform or to develop new ones that are standards-based," commented Bill Meisel, president of TMA Associates and Publisher & Editor of Speech Strategy News. "The widespread use of the Asterisk platform presents an opportunity for VoiceXML developers to increase adoption of speech solutions in cost-sensitive markets. And who isn't sensitive to cost?" [click heading for more]
SpeechStorm has today revealed the results of an Environment Agency survey into proactive outbound notifications i.e. where a text message (SMS) or an automated phone call is used to proactively contact customers. The Environment Agency commissioned the survey to contact a selection of its small business customers and measure the effectiveness of SMS messaging versus outbound phone messaging to raise awareness of their Internet services. Working in partnership with outsourced contact center provider Teleperformance and using SpeechStorm’s Proactive Notification Suite the Environment Agency surveyed a sample of 250 customers using automated voice technology by phone and 250 using text messages. In each case the customer was alerted about new legislation and given a ‘call to action’ to find out more information online. The survey found that consumers are seven times more likely to act in response to a speech rather than an SMS notification. [click heading for more]
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