ScanSoft Announces AudioMining XML Speech Indexing Products
ScanSoft, a provider of imaging, speech and language solutions, introduced two products based on new AudioMining XML speech indexing technology - the AudioMining Development System and Dragon MediaIndexer for Windows.
The products use ScanSoft's speech recognition capabilities to automatically create XML speech index and timestamp data for every word spoken within rich media files, and allows text-based keywords and phrases to be used to playback speech information at precise locations within audio and video content.
In related news, ScanSoft announced that Microsoft and a number of leading technology organizations have provided their support for ScanSoft's AudioMining XML speech indexing technology. ScanSoft's new XML speech indexing technologies and products are based in part on audio mining technology previously owned by Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) and recently acquired by ScanSoft subsequent to its December 2001 purchase of speech and language assets of L&H.
"There is a wealth of valuable content that is trapped in the world's audio and visual files," said Jackie Fenn, vice president and research fellow at Gartner Group. "Speech indexing and audio mining is an emerging application of speech recognition that will open up this content to corporate, academic and government customers."
According to ScanSoft, it is the first speech and language vendor to enable the affordable cataloging of rich media content, replacing costly manual indexing with automated solutions. The company's new products, one designed for Web and application developers, and the other as a desktop application, are also the first products to enable the integration of XML speech indexing with Web, content management and business productivity applications.
ScanSoft's AudioMining XML speech indexing products include: ·AudioMining Development System - Allows developers to integrate XML speech indexing, search and precise playback capabilities with Web, commercial, government and custom software applications. The system can be used to add rich media archive and retrieval capabilities to a wide range of applications, including Web, call center, content management, customer relationship management, database, security, training and video editing programs.
The AudioMining Development System supports a wide range of applications through its ability to create XML speech index data from broadcast-, telephony- and amateur-quality speech content. It also includes Dragon MediaIndexer, a turnkey Microsoft Windows application that creates XML speech index data from tapes and from digital media files in Microsoft Windows Media, RealMedia and other popular formats. The product replaces manual indexing and cataloging efforts with automatic speech indexing and cataloging. The Dragon MediaIndexer is intended to be used by non-technical staff to automatically index and archive media content for Web sites as well as for broadcast, corporate and government archives.
An early customer of the Dragon MediaIndexer is Radio Free Asia, a not-for-profit corporation that broadcasts news and information in nine languages to listeners in Asia. The organization is currently using the Dragon MediaIndexer to automatically index and catalog their archives of news recordings to make them searchable through a standard Web interface. The organization had previously been funding an outsourced manual indexing effort, which was expensive, slow and resulted in a limited set of search indexes being keyed into the system. The new approach is affordable, fast and results in 100 percent of the speech information within rich media files being used as index data.
"Dragon MediaIndexer dramatically increases our effectiveness in distributing streaming news content throughout our organization because it allows our broadcasters and news reporters to instantly find the exact audio or audio visual information they seek," said David Baden, CTO at Radio Free Asia. "Without Dragon MediaIndexer, locating and cataloging our news source material would be a drain on our valuable human and financial resources. This highly effective productivity tool is the ideal solution for our organization, and we have been very impressed with the results."
ScanSoft's New AudioMining XML Speech Indexing Technology Gains Support from Technology Organizations
ScanSoft announced broad industry support for its AudioMining XML speech indexing technology.
In the related announcement (above), ScanSoft introduced two new products based on AudioMining technology - the AudioMining Development System and Dragon MediaIndexer for Windows.
ScanSoft's AudioMining XML speech indexing technology has received broad support from a variety of technology organizations, including:
• Microsoft SharePoint Group. "SharePoint and ScanSoft's AudioMining technology share synergy to offer the end user effective technology to aggregate audio and text information among small and large groups within an organization," said Gytis Barzdukas, group product manager for Microsoft SharePoint. "The business benefits of this combined technology will provide superior management for multiple data stores and file formats."
• Telequip Labs - "Our call recording solutions can be used by security personnel to help monitor and screen conversations between high-risk individuals," said John Mow, vice president and CTO for Telequip Labs Inc. "ScanSoft's AudioMining will allow us to analyze recorded phone calls, not only to identify known security vocabulary words, but also to identify new subjects that might warrant investigation. Thanks to AudioMining, phone call conversations can now be searched and analyzed as simply as other text data, which dramatically increases the types of solutions our business can offer to our customers." • ActionPoint - "As an information capture solution provider, ActionPoint's vision is to help our customers transform any form of communication with their customers, partners or employees into usable content. Content that drives their enterprise systems. Historically, these critical business communications have been on paper and fax. More recently CRM initiatives are driving our customers to capture more and more forms of communication, audio being near the top of the list. ScanSoft has been a key partner in providing us with superior OCR technology. We see the AudioMining technology as a logical extension to our InputAccel capture platform and commend ScanSoft in taking a bold step towards make audio mining an affordable reality," said John Stetak, vice president, marketing, ActionPoint.
• Wohl Associates - "ScanSoft's imaging solutions deliver significant cost savings and productivity gains through the automatic scanning and indexing of documents," said Amy Wohl, president of Wohl Associates. "Their AudioMining technology will both leverage ScanSoft's experience in imaging and expand their presence in content management, while establishing a new solution area in the speech processing market."
• TMA Associates - "ScanSoft's AudioMining leverages its core speech recognition technology, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, into an important area, allowing voice files to be treated more like text files," said Bill Meisel, president of TMA Associates, a speech industry consulting group. "With small and large-vocabulary speech recognition offerings, as well as text-to-speech, ScanSoft is well-positioned to grow in many areas of the speech application market."
• J. Markowitz, Consultants - "When you look at the capabilities of AudioMining - and the tools that have been released along with it - it becomes clear that ScanSoft was able to mine its rich history in enhancing productivity using document imaging and apply that history to the use of speech as a productivity tool for audio and rich media," said Judith Markowitz, president, J. Markowitz, Consultants. "This kind of cross-fertilization augurs well for future ScanSoft offerings and is good for the speech-processing industry as a whole."
• Document Imaging Report - "At the recent AIIM 2002 Exhibition, enterprise content management vendors like Documentum, Interwoven, Gauss, and IBM all spoke about their visions to embrace multimedia files. Already a major player in the paper capture space with its OmniPage OCR technology, ScanSoft is now offering a tool to fulfill the indexing demands of emerging multimedia repositories," said Ralph Gammon, editor of the Document Imaging Report. "ScanSoft's AutoMining XML speech indexing technology is analogous to full-text OCR for audio files. ScanSoft is making good on its promise to deliver capture technology for multiple types of input."