Did You Say Know or No?

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Advances in speech recognition technology are helping providers automate the dictation process.


At its inception, speech recognition technology was offered up as yet another way to reduce healthcare costs by eliminating the need for medical transcriptionists through automation of the dictation process. The software soon revealed significant limitations, however, including the inability to recognize some accents and nuances in conversations—the difference between know and no, for example. Those issues have led some physicians to conclude that speech recognition technology may be more work than it's worth. But some new advances could have detractors changing their tune. 
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Will biometrics measure up to the future?

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Who could forget the scene from Tsui Hark's 1997 B-movie "Double Team," where an imprisoned Jean-Claude Van Damme scrapes the skin off his index finger, attaches it to an impromptu mechanical contraption and booby-traps it to hit the scanner at precisely the scheduled time each morning, so that his captors don't notice his escape?

Indeed, biometric identification systems are a bit harder to fool than simply getting the password right. And as this technology advances, so do people's concerns over its true effectiveness. 
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Review: iPhone voice dialers

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After a year-and-a-half with my iPhone, I can’t imagine ever going back to my PDA and cell phone—the iPhone runs my life, telling me where I need to be and letting me stay in touch wirelessly. But for all its wizardry, it can’t obey my commands, something even my ancient Motorola phone did admirably. That makes it tough to call someone when I’m on the go and practically impossible to use when I’m driving.

For this round-up, I looked at eight apps that promise to let you make calls by voice command. None of them fill the bill perfectly, but they’re a reasonable alternative to dialing using the keypad or your contact list if you’re not driving. 
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Voxeo Acquires VoiceObjects

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Voxeo, which produces standards-based voice applications, reported Tuesday that it has acquired VoiceObjects.
Voxeo, which seeks to develop easy-to-use voice products, said VoiceObjects, which provides self-service application development analytics solutions, will assist users in developing phone applications that can be deployed on VoiceXML platforms. 
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Cisco Plans TelePresence Translation Next Year

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Cisco will add real-time translation to its TelePresence high-definition conference technology next year, enabling people in several different countries to meet virtually and each hear the other participants' comments in their own languages.


The feature is expected to go on sale in the second half of 2009 with an initial set of 20 languages, said Marthin De Beer, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Emerging Technologies Group. It will include speech recognition in the speaker's native language, a translation engine, and text-to-speech technology to deliver the words in a synthesized voice on the other end. Users will also be able to display subtitles if they choose, he said. Both Asian and Western languages will be represented in the initial set, which will later be expanded. 
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Cisco Delivers Advanced Network-Based Media Processing Platform

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Cisco® (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced a media processing platform that simplifies live and on-demand media sharing across PCs, mobile devices and other digital screens, by seamlessly formatting video and rich media for viewing on any device. The create once and share anywhere Cisco Media Processing platform provides media conversion, real-time post production, editing, formatting, and network distribution capabilities in a single networked solution to help businesses develop targeted visual communications that drive intimacy with employees and customers. [click heading for more]

NTT DOCOMO Enhances Voice-activated Services with HP Media Server

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HP announced today that NTT DOCOMO, a world leader in 3G and multimedia services and the largest mobile operator in Japan, deployed a standards-based media server from HP to reduce costs and shorten time to market for new services.
NTT DOCOMO is currently migrating its 54 million customers to the HP OpenCall Media Platform, which is designed to enhance the quality of voice-activated services. The server supports NTT DOCOMO offerings such as voice mail services, customized ringback tone services and interactive voice response services. The HP OpenCall Media Platform is designed to support many of NTT DOCOMO’s multimedia services. 
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IBM's next five big things

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[nik's note: this is the original author's opinion, not mine (which may or may not agree)]

This press release from IBM claims that speech recognition for the Web will be a hot technology within five years. As I mentioned previously, IBM has been dedicating some effort to speech recognition. It's a nice idea, I'd like to see it happen, but it's usually a good idea to be skeptical of claims for any speech recognition application. [click heading for more]