April/May 1997

Magazine Features

2006: The Continued Emergence of Natural Language Speech Applications

The speech recognition industry continues to grow and as we move into 2006, we will see more sophisticated deployments, across a wide range of vertical markets. New applications will be improvements on earlier versions, both in terms of functionality, caller-friendliness and level of personalization. Additionally, most new deployments will continue to be VoiceXML-based. …

Creating Demand for Outsourced Voice Services

Voice business outsourcing is a developing market with huge potential. As the wider voice market grows, standardized applications and new entrants to the space are creating a dynamic and responsive sector whose appeal transcends verticals.

How Developers Can Choose the Right API Standard

While speech technology today still falls short in many ways, it is clear that there is no shortage of "standard" APIs. Application developers need to take the time to choose a development environment that will fit both current and future needs.

How TTS Works: The Technology Behind Text

Unlimited vocabulary speech synthesis, or text-to-speech (TTS), has had an impressive history over the last two decades. During this time, it has moved out of the laboratory and onto the desktop. A variety of TTS systems are now available; such systems are becoming increasingly natural-sounding, intelligible, and even expressive. Yes, TTS technology is here today, and cost-effective applications that utilize it are starting to proliferate.

MedSpeak Gives Radiologists Advantage

Speech recognition technology developed by IBM and top radiologists is being used in a continuous speech dictation product that enables radiologist to work more efficiently while cutting health care costs.

Speech Joins Computer Telephony Boom

Computer telephony has become one of the hottest applications for speech recognition, with many companies producing products specifically for the CT market and one major speech recognition company even changing its entire company focus to pursue the CT market.

Speech Reaches the Stars

Speech recognition’s contribution to assistive technology was in part responsible for one of the most important breakthroughs in theoretical physics since Einstein.

Speech Turns People with Disabilities into Technological Leaders

Speech input for computers is here and promises to revolutionize the way we use them. Many experts think speech input is the most important development in computers since the advent of the PC. Speech simply makes the computer easier and more intuitive to use.

Speech’s Price War

In some ways, the cost of current large vocabulary speech recognition systems is artificial. Decades of research and development have made speech recognition programs among the most complex and expensive computer programs ever devised. However, the cost of reproducing software is trivial. The transition from hardware-dependent to software-only products indicates that speech recognition technology has become, in some sense, totally intellectual property, only a “sequence.” But, of course, the genetic code of an entire human being is expressible as “merely a sequence of nucleotides” (...after millions of years of evolution).

The ABCs for IVR

There are three primary types of voice recognition: number recognition; which involves the numbers 0-9, and the words “yes”, “no” and “oh”; alphabet recognition, for the letters A to Z and word recognition, in which application specific words such as “operator,” “service” or “checking,” are identified.

Voice-Driven Technology is Focus of ASAT

The latest developments and applications of speech recognition, text-to-speech, speaker voice verification and other advanced speech technologies will be the focus of the fourth annual Advanced Speech Applications & Technologies (ASAT) Conference, April 14-16 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott in Burlingame, CA.

Weighing the Possibilities of the Scalable Language API

Why would the world need another API that deals with speech?

Editor's Letter

Letter from the Editor

Speech technology continues to gain acceptance among developers and end users, and this issue of the magazine strongly reflects that trend. Speech now has implications in many different markets, including the computer telephony industry and assistive technology, which we examine in this issue.

Human Factor

The Alpha Bail

A Little Bit of Energy Can Make a Big Difference<@SM>Usually, speech recognition is the preferred modality in telephony applications that require non-numeric input. Imagine asking users to type in something like the name of a movie or a restaurant or a street name using a telephone keypad. That would be a cruel usability joke. When entering information that cannot be otherwise conveyed using telephone keypad numbers, speech recognition, as a rule, provides a far superior…