November/December 2002

Magazine Features

2002 Speech Solutions Winners

Best Practices: Achieving Success with Speech

When deploying speech services, what best practices do successful companies follow to engage and delight callers? What separates the good speech services from the great ones? Using real company examples, based on SpeechWorks Best Practices competition, this article will describe four deployments and look at how several companies followed best practices to maximize results from speech.

Developing Verbal, Visual, and Multimodel User Interfaces for the Same Application

PC users access the World Wide Web using a graphical user interface (GUI) that is commonly specified with HTML. Telephone and cell phone users access the Web using a verbal user interface (VUI) often specified with VoiceXML.

Do Your Users Feel Silly?

Years ago, I was telling a friend about my long-standing interest in the “animal language” debate. I had studied bee signaling systems, bird songs and a number of attempts to establish various forms of verbal behavior in chimpanzees. I told my friend that some of the communicative abilities of several species are truly amazing but that drawing anthropomorphic conclusions about the abilities would be a mistake. He nodded, chuckled and proceeded to describe a transaction he had witnessed years earlier involving his college roommate.

Multimodality: The Next Wave of Mobile Interaction

Multimodality is new technology that hopes to enhance the mobile user experience by enabling network operators to combine speech, touch and onscreen displays for intuitive and powerful mobile applications.

Speech and the Automobile

No matter where you get your car and driver news, you've probably seen the recent flurry of headlines reporting new implementations of voice recognition technology in cars - and not just in high-end cars, but in midrange autos such as Honda. As little as ten years ago, something like voice recognition technology in the automobile sounded positively space age to most, but today, voice and wireless technology are becoming more and more commonplace in the ultimate mobile device—the car. But will these on-board communications capabilities change the way we drive, the way we interact with our cars?

Speech Goes Mobile

What is the value of speech technologies in mobile devices? On its face the answer is obvious: Speech is the most natural of all user interfaces. Humans are genetically engineered to talk and listen, so unless human genetics changes sometime soon, Speech is and always will be the most natural interface between humans and machines.

Speech Recognition at KAIST

A group of researchers at the Brain Science Research Center of KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) in Taejon, Korea has been working on modeling of human auditory central nerve systems for noise-robust speech recognition. This research has been funded as a part of the Brain Neuroinformatics Research Program, one of three major national brain research programs started in November 1998 for 10 years by the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology.

What Do Consumers Think of Speech?

Over the past year enterprise and telco buyers have repeatedly asked us the above question. I even heard a debate about this issue on a morning radio program in Boston earlier this year. Speech Technology Magazine decided to find out the answer.

Whom Should I Say Is Calling?

It’s a simple enough idea: voice user interfaces (VUIs) should use ordinarry language, as it is spoken today. They shouldn’t be using it in some “corrected” form to satisfy the nostalgic longings of pedants for some imagined purer form of English.

Why Didn't You Say So?

There is no question that technology as a whole has brought sweeping and significant changes to the world over the past 10 or 15 years. From the den to the factory floor, people are connected to information and services in ways they once would have never thought possible.

Why Input Devices Matter

There are many factors that play a role in the quality of speech recognition systems, and one that might not get enough attention is the part of input devices. Such things as noise cancellation and microphone placement are just a few of the contributing factors to this issue, but can be imperative to the quality of the output.

Forward Thinking

The For-Real Story

Although September 11th focused attention on biometrics, people still ask me whether speaker authentication is "for real." I decided that one of the best ways to answer that question was to provide a sample of the variety of ways speaker authentication is being used in real, everyday operations.

Industry View

Is Speech "Cool?"

Now that school's back in session, those of you with college students have probably been talking planes, trains and automobiles to help get that future CEO/doctor/attorney/poet off to campus. Yet one of the truly rewarding parts of that logistical challenge has probably been hearing your son or daughter say, "Hey I called Amtrak/United/Continental (take your pick) and this voice recognition thing answered. Pretty cool!"

Voice Value

Improved Education Could Increase Technology Use

In Russia, children with disabilities can be denied an education. In America, we have IDEA. In Brazil, it is acceptable to deny employment to a person with a disability, specifically because he or she is disabled. In the United States we have the Ticket to Work program. In Italy, there are buildings with steps, but no wheelchair ramps. In the United States, we have the Americans with Disabilities Act.