May/June 2002

Magazine Features

Does Every Business Need Speech?

Just think about it. To open a business, the first thing you do is order a telephone number from the local telephone company. Then, as soon as you’re open for business, answering incoming calls becomes critical to your success. Answering the phones is just the beginning.

Europe Likely To Drive Multimodal Experience

With so many Europeans packing a mobile phone these days, network operators are finding it hard to deliver the revenue performances of past days. Value-added services like Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) were supposed to deliver the needed top line growth, but WAP has had difficulty achieving mass market acceptance thus far.

Human Barriers in the Use of Voice Services

In the early days of speech recognition two major applications seemed to excite people. The first one was the voice-activated typewriter-just dictate a letter in the microphone and a printed hardcopy will come out. The other one was the voice-activated dialer: just say a name into the phone and the call will be placed. Today, we know these dreams are reality.

Speech is NOT Dialog

Is there a difference between speech recognition and conversation management? The recognizer hears what was said and then the computer just does something and responds, right? Actually there are big differences between the problem of deciphering the words contained in an utterance and the problem of carrying on a conversation.

Speech Services for Carrier-Grade Systems

The telephone has been a trusted communications device for more than 100 years. But with the advent of the Internet, information is literally at our fingertips. Businesses are looking for the ultimate communications channel, combining the reliability and convenience of the telephone with the cost-savings and personalization capabilities of the Web.

The New Importance of Speech Technology in Uncertain Times

The current threat on security in the United States has given us all reason to reflect upon how we would react in an emergency, and what national safety and security measures exist to enable us to function under duress. One of the most crucial elements of any kind of disaster and or emergency recovery plan is a reliable communications strategy.

Voices in Harmony

Speech technology is rapidly altering the way enterprises communicate with their customers. And while technology adoption thus far has been gradual, the pace of change is beginning to quicken. Where is speech technology heading in the next five years?

VoiceXML and SALT

VoiceXML and SALT are both markup languages that describe a speech interface. However, they work in very different ways, largely due to two reasons: (i) they have different goals, (ii) they have different Web heritages.

You Say Zee, I Say Zed

George Bernard Shaw spoke about England and America as "...two countries divided by a common language". If Shaw had been speaking technologically, he would have been showing the seeds of localization. The need to ‘localize’ a software product has been understood for several decades.

Forward Thinking

Speaking in Tongues

We live in a global world where it is no longer unusual for even a small business to market its goods and services globally. Wireless networks are expanding the global reach of business by making it possible to provide telecommunications services to areas that could not have wired services.

Students Develop Innovative Prototype Speech Applications

Student teams are very creative when asked to design and implement speech applications of their choice. Here are some of the prototype speech applications recently implemented by students at Georgia Institute of Technology, Washington State University, Portland State University and Oregon Health and Sciences University.

Human Factor

All Too Human Factor Determining the Speech Growth-Market

There seems to be a growing awareness among speech industry players that making money in speech is more a function of good VUI design practices than the mere exercise of ever more innovative and impressive technologies. This was evident at the Telephony Voice User Interface Conference this year in a number of ways.

Industry View

Carriers & VoiceXML: Skin the Legacy

The legacy telco voicemail market now approaches 500 million mailboxes on both wireline and wireless networks. Some incumbent vendors have not done very well in migrating from their legacy solutions to voice-enabled voicemail.

Voice Value

Compensating for the Challenge

If an American goes to Paris and cannot speak French, is the American disabled? She is challenged at the very least. Put her on a telephone in the foreign country, needing to communicate without the benefit of hand gestures or facial expressions, and her handicap becomes greater.