October/November 1998

Magazine Features

A Woman's Voice

Seeing the "double disability" endured by female cerebral palsy victims sparked one speech executive's career choice. Giving machines a female voice is still a motivating factor for Dr. Caroline Henton, vice president of Strategic Technology at fonix Corp., who is also the British English voice talent for Pulse Point Communications and Centigram Communications, as well as the author of 44 technical and research publications.

Beyond Recognition, to Understanding

You could make a pretty good case that the birthplace of the speech recognition industry is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Computer Science. Several leading speech recognition companies owe their core technology to developments at MIT, and it remains an “idea factory” for the speech recognition industry.

Building the Interface of the Future

As the worldwide speech marketing sales executive for IBM Speech Systems, Anne-Marie Derouault’s responsibilities include directing all worldwide marketing and sales efforts for IBM’s speech recognition business, including the ViaVoice family of products. She has been a key player in the speech recognition industry for over 15 years, long enough to regard the current industry buzzwords “Natural Language” with a sense of deja vu.

Concrete Speech

Maintaining city streets and sidewalks is one of the most important functions of amunicipal government. Regular inspection of city roads is an expensive, but necessaryfunction of any city. In the Colorado Rockies, one city has come up with a speech<@SM>recognition solution that allows them to perform the task better than ever, in a fraction<@SM>of the time it took them in the past.

Dragon Slays Robot

In his book Only the Paranoid Survive, Intel’s Andy Grove uses the term “strategic inflection point” to describe “what liberal arts people call a paradigm shift” - (basically, a point in time where a business can go one of two ways.) While the choice at the time may appear to be between two very similar paths, choosing the right one leads to great success, while the wrong choice can be catastrophic. For example, the development of the Internet and E-commerce confronts many marketers with a strategic inflection point.

Free Speech: Philips Joins Continuous Dictation Race

Philips has introduced a large vocabulary, general English dictation system for business, correspondence, and general use. FreeSpeech98 is the fourth new dictation system to come to market along with IBM, Dragon, and Lernout & Hauspie. Philips was actually the first to offer commercially available continuous speech recognition in the vertical market for radiology and other applications.

Money Talks: Speech in the Financial Market

As speech recognition matures and moves from research and development into real world applications, companies need to find vertical markets where their products make sense.

Specialized Vocabularies for Professional Speech

Continuous speech recognition software needs to deal with informationspecific to the language and subject matter in order to be useful. The software must“understand” whether the user is speaking English, Spanish or German and if their<@SM>topic is business, sports or medicine.

Speech in Telecommunications

Since joining ATandT in 1977, Jay G. Wilpon, Director of SpeechProcess-ing Software and Technology Research within ATandT Labs, has focused hisresearch on problems in automatic speech recognition.

SPEECH RECONNAISSANCE

As industry leaders and analysts prepare for the fourth annual SpeechTEK ‘98 conference and exhibition, scheduled for Oct. 27 and 28 at the New York Hilton, the technology itself continues to gain acceptance from a wider audience.

Speech, Touch and Other Interfaces

This magazine has long touted speech technology as the mostnatural interface between people and machines, but we recognize that it is not the onlyone. As speech technology continues to improve, becoming faster and cheaper, our enthusiasm grows.

SpeechTEK ’98: Bringing Speech to the Business World

William (“Ozzie”) Osborne, general manager of IBM SpeechSystems and William A. Bautz, chief technology officer of the New York Stock Exchange,will be the keynote speakers at the fourth annual SpeechTEK conference and exhibition at<@SM>the New York Hilton and Towers, Oct. 27-28. ><@SM><@SM>

Winning the Battle with Background Noise

Doug Burke // 31 Oct 1998

Microphones and headsets are the good news/bad news joke of the speech recognition industry. The good news is that noise canceling microphones make speech recognition software more effective. The bad news is that many people who express initial interest in using speech are turned off when they find it requires a headset.

COLUMNS:

Forward Thinking

To Tell the Truth

Judith Markowitz // 31 Oct 1998

Does it seem that we are immersed in an atmosphere of half-truths, boldfaced lies, deception, and willful manipulation?

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