September/October 2004

Magazine Features

2004 Speech Solutions Winners

Are Your Ideas Safe?

John Boruka warns that companies need to be aware of the possibility of patent infringement, copyright and trademarks disputes and trade secret misappropriation.

Modernizing Communication among Field Service Workers

Travis White, vice president of marketing and product management at Datria, explains that predictable service should be a company’s number one priority above all else.

Still on the Fence?

If you’re still “on the fence” regarding a speech upgrade to your voice response system, then Ed Margulies has a few tips for taking the speech recognition plunge, along with examples of what speech will and won’t do for you.

Usability Scorecard

Editor's Letter

Before There Is a Future, There Is a Vision

There was a time when an "industry vision" in speech technology might simply have been "making it through next year." A whole lot has changed and there are a whole lot more questions being asked today.

Forward Thinking

Automating the Tower of Babel

When we think about how speech recognition is used we generally envision it operating in a human-machine interaction. That's not surprising because that's the context in which speech recognition operates today. This human-machine paradigm is not, however, how speech technology will be used in the future; one of the most exciting areas of automated human-human communication is speech-to-speech machine translation.

What's New with VoiceXML 2.0?

Industry View

From (Political) Show Business to 'Go' Business

The voice automation industry in the US can be generally situated in a pretty wide cross-section of political landscapes: you've got the Dallas metroplex (Bush country), California (Schwarzenegger's domain), and the Northeast Corridor (Virginia through DC up to liberal New York and Massachusetts).

Revisiting the ROI of Speech

Back in June 2002, while I was a senior vice president with The Kelsey Group, we conducted a research study on "The ROI of Speech." A select group of relatively large companies, primarily in the financial services and catalogue sales sectors provided some impressive numbers that have been baked into countless presentations delivered by the peripatetic SpeechWorks/Nuance sales force. …

A View from AVIOS

Matching Technology and Application

If the Star-Trek Communicator existed, communicating with machines would not require learning a programming language or the 'pidginization' of language it often feels like we have to endure today. Communication ease is limited by the state of core technologies; improving these technologies can lead to more speech applications. Improved speech applications can also come from rethinking the voice user interface. However, the greatest bottleneck to widespread adoption of speech technologies is the difficulty of balancing…

Voice Value

Desktop Dictation: Then and Now

Desktop dictation has changed in the 10 years I have been in the field. From available features to distribution channels, let's take a look at where we were, where we are, how we got here, and where we might expect to go.