March/April 2005

Magazine Features

Embedding Speech into Mobile Devices

Anne Rosenfeld, a Boston, Mass.-based producer of neuroscience conferences for educators, found the 75-minute (one-way) commute between her home and office to be a big waste of time until a dead cell phone helped her become more productive. Needing a new portable phone to keep in touch with her office, suppliers, hotels and family and friends, Rosenfeld bought a new Samsung phone which she later learned was speech-enabled with software from VoiceSignal. …

Speech Enables Disaster Recovery Operations

On any given day, there could be an event that drives communications off the rails. Whether it is a technical problem, weather related issue, or a major disaster, it becomes challenging for a company to communicate, operate and respond effectively. Enabling communications among employees, customers and the world within the first 24-48 hours is critical to either maintaining operations or getting the business back up and running smoothly and effectively. If you can't communicate, you…

The Role of Speech in Healthcare

According to the American Medical Association (AMA), there is a nationwide shortage of more than 168,000 nurses and other health care professionals. With 60 percent of emergency rooms working at or above capacity, it is essential that hospitals utilize their staff and time carefully, which is becoming more difficult to accomplish as more and more people are turning to the emergency room for care. CDC reports from 2002 estimate that approximately 110.2 million visits were…

Tools of the Trade

Accelerating Time-to-Market Speech Development Tools

Transcription: What's It Good For Anyway?

Human-computer dialogue systems have claimed center stage in the speech industry bowinghappily to the kudos of an accepting marketplace. This is the inverse of the state of affairs that existed in the mid-1990s when PC-based dictation using statistical processing was clearly the industry's star. Shrink-wrapped general dictation products were awarded extensive shelf space in computer stores and the speech industry had visions of a speech revolution built atop boxes of Dragon NaturallySpeaking® (DNS) and ViaVoice. …

Editor's Letter

What Does It Mean?

What impact will the recent acquisition moves of SBC and Verizon have on the mainstreaming of speech? Dan Miller of OPUS Research suggested we watch what happens to the SBC Call Center Solutions Group in competition with Verizon's Enterprise Systems Group.

Forward Thinking

VoiceXML 2.0: A Real Standard for a Real World

VoiceXML 2.0 is more than just a standard. It is a growing infrastructure and community of speech application developers.

Human Factor

The Legal Threat to the Effective VUI

Nobody likes lawyers - as they say - at least not unless or until they find themselves in need of one. Lawyers bear the brunt of numerous jokes and insults and their professional class is consistently judged to be among the least esteemed in our culture.

Industry View

2005: Yet Another Year of Intelligent Migration

OPUS Research is a long-standing and unrepentant booster of speech-enablement. We stand for judicious use of advanced speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech conversion (TTS) and all the attendant hardware, software, professional services and tooling (soaking up something on the order of $28 billion in 2005) directed at a single goal. That is to take existing self-service infrastructure - on a Web site, in front of a corporate directory 'auto-attendant,' baked into a contact center or hosted.

A View from AVIOS

It's Time to Join AVIOS

Voice Value

Recognition Software Still Needs Refinement

Speech recognition software has become as easy to find as candy canes at Christmas. From office supply stores to the Internet to consultants who specialize in speech implementation, it's pretty easy to buy the software. But once a user decides he wants to be a dictator, he needs to choose an implementation strategy.