He's declared speech recognition one of the "Top 10 Technology Flops"...
Hmm...
Let us count the ways?
Beginning with the medical profession - 40,000 active physician users generating about 18 million lines per month with speech recognition technology, in the US alone.
Or Field Automation... Equipment inspectors, mechanics, insurance claims adjusters, real estate agents, couriers and other highly mobile, hands-on employees are now using embedded speech recognition on portable devices making data entry and lookup faster and cheaper.
Smart Phone users easily searching the web by voice alone, with uncannily accurate and powerful results.
Notwithstanding smart phone capability - over 60% of "ordinary" cell phone users can just say to their cell phones: "Call steve tobak" and that phone number will ring!
Then there's Ford, (the car manufacturer); Do the words "Ford Sync" ring a bell? As in "play artist so-&-so" or "Call the office".. look ma, no hands!
And on the subject of cars - there is VoiceBox's new embedded speech-controlled technology that now allows us to control what our car's various features do and when, control our car's radios and navigation systems.
Is it also curious that GM is busily seeking Telematics engineers that can "Provide technical leadership for advanced speech technology development"..??
Let's not forget the major news networks over recent weeks, where one cannot watch in the AM without seeing at least one advertisement for Dragon Naturally Speaking?
As to "keyboarding" - Would this video help bring us up to speed, a little?
Where Rob Chambers does just about whatever he wants with Windows Vista™ built-in speech recognition?
Moving right along to the US Military and a company called Adacel, building technology allowing military pilots to interact with modern avionics, using simple voice commands, built on the awesome Microsoft ESP platform?
Or the IBM MASTOR speech-to-speech translation systems presently used by the military, in Iraq?
Speaking of IBM, does their joint venture with Cisco Systems to build speech driven self-service kiosks inside banks tell us anything?
And then there is the globally popular SpeechMagic system from Royal Philips Electronics.. which now offers extremely accurate remote speech recognition across a network, in 23 different languages?
But at the end of the day, we ask:
You've called a large company, sometime lately? What exactly do you think you might be doing when you talk back to that computer voice.. pray tell?
We hope our readers will forgive our quasi-diatribe..
But speech recognition is one of the most pervasive technogies around us these days - and it's only getting better!
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** We've been told by a very reliable, trustable source, since this post went public, that just because a blog may be viewed on the CNET site, doesn't just automatically mean that it was written by a CNET employee!
Labels: speech recognition
posted by The Team @ 3:16 AM
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1 Comments:
I don't know about all the areas your are talking about, but I do know that at least in my little corner of the world, the medical community either records notes and has those notes transcripted by a human using one of those little pedals, or if they are using speech recognition, have mandatory human review for inaccurate translations. And while the technology may be advancing quickly, for the common person, they don't seem to use it for much, and if they do use it, say on a cell phone or call center, it's hardly flowing speech recognition and is often a pain or at best, more timely.
"Do you mean... ?"
"NO"
"Do you mean... ?"
"YES"
"Please try again.."
"Did you say this?"
"Yes"
I've never had a call center computer voice ask me if I really just pushed that button.
Maybe the reason it's considered as a flop by some is because the hollywood aspect of speech recognition. We expect it to do the things we see in star trek. Those are unrealistic expectations, of course, but they do exist. And the speech recognition industry doesn't necessarily abstain from playing on that hype when seeking funding, seed capital, advertising revenue, etc..... :)
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