Sony announces enhanced Handheld Recorders

 

 Sony-Europe’s IT Peripherals division has announced seven new handheld recorders that declare its desires to dominate the digital dictation marketplace.

 They each incorporate high audio fidelity, increased recording times, memory capacity and impressive playback features at nicely competitive price points to capture student, business and professional consumers.

 

 The 'Professional' model numbers are the ICDSX68, ICDSX78 and ICDSX78DR9; the 'Business' model number is ICDUX60B and the 'Student' model numbers are ICDB600, ICDP620, ICDP630F.

 Via the Sony-Europe press release page:
"The market for digital dictation machines is still very important, particularly with voice recognition software making transcription easier”, said Mikuni Shikada, product manager, Sony Europe's IT Peripherals division.

 

Nuance challenges SpinVox in voicemail-to-text

 

 Nuance Communications, Inc., announced today at CTIA Wireless 2008 the "Nuance Voicemail to Text". Offered via wireless carriers, transcribed messages are sent to users as SMS or email messages.

   Move over, SpinVox, a big dog is headed for your porch..

“Converting voicemail to text is a powerful and simple concept. But implementing a highly scalable semi-automated service is far more complex and requires highly accurate speech recognition – technology that takes decades to develop,” said Steve Chambers, president, mobile and consumer services division, Nuance. “The Nuance Voicemail to Text Service integrates speech technology with over 3,000 Nuance transcriptionists, hosted in a Nuance-owned facility, with proven security, scalability, and reliability.”

Looks like SpinVox is about to get a real run for the money!

 

Over-the-phone note & task transcription

 

 Via Angel.com:
"SalesByFone from Angel.com makes it possible to access, update, and manage accounts, contacts and leads directly in salesforce.com through voice commands over the phone. With a simple phone call, you can record your impressions about a just-completed meeting, set a follow-up task, or connect directly to a contact".

 Per PRWEB - March 5, 2008:
Angel.com, the leading provider of hosted, on-demand call center applications, has partnered with SimulScribe, the largest provider of voicemail-to-text services and visual voicemail applications, to integrate speech-to-text functionality with Angel.com products and services. The first offering using speech-to-text functionality is Angel.com's new Salesbyfone application.

 SimulScribe's technology allows Salesbyfone users to transcribe meeting notes and other details over the phone and see notes appear, within seconds, in Salesforce.com contact records. Users can also automatically dial and send an e-mail to a contact simply by speaking it over the phone. These functions occur in near-real time, allowing users to quickly act on or respond to critical business situations as they happen.

 Salesbyfone is the latest in Angel.com's suite of IVR (Interactive Voice Response) integration applications for Salesforce.com. Salesbyfone provides phone-based access to Salesforce.com accounts, empowering sales executives and other users to access, update, and manage key prospect information directly in Salesforce.com through voice commands.

 

Speech recognition's accuracy better than human transcription..

 

 Welcome news for speech recognition proponents!

 HealthImaging.com (a site for Healthcare IT professionals) posted a news article yesterday, December 13, about a presentation at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA)'s annual meeting last month, documenting that the reports which were manually transcribed by humans, showed higher error rates than the reports that were transcribed through speech recognition!

 John Floyd, MD a partner in the 24-member Radiology Consultants of Iowa (RCI), reported “The rate for significant errors, requiring the preparation of an addendum, was 0.6 percent for speech recognition and 2 percent for traditional transcription.”

 Floyd also noted speech recognition significantly increased his firm's efficiency: "Separate data for this practice indicated that average turn-around time for traditional transcription was greater than 24 hours while that for speech recognition was less than one hour.."

 Dr. Floyd further confirmed that the accuracy rate for speech recognition reported by his group was independently verified by 3rd party analysis, conducted at one of the hospitals his partnership services.

 In an On10Net blog post, Bill Crounse MD, Healthcare Industry Director for Microsoft Corporation predicted earlier this year that speech recognition would open up new vistas in the healthcare industry..

 We're pleased to see his predictions coming true!

 

MIT's Browsing through speech inside videos

 

 MIT's new CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) "Lecture Browser" may be raising the bar on searching the spoken audio in videos, for indexing. In fact, it's receiving over 20,000 hits per day - and it is to date only indexing lectures.

 Originally funded by Microsoft and first announced in August, the Lecture Browser offers results in either video or audio timeline sections, the section containing the search term is highlighted, and snippets of surrounding text are displayed. The searcher can also "jump" to the relevant section of the video directly from the index, as well.

There are some impressive features built into this rather advanced application.

• Optimized Speech Transcription:
  • The speech recognition has been trained and configured to accurately transcribe accented speech, using short snippets of recorded speech spoken under various accents.
  
  
• Accurate recognition of uncommon words
  • A massive vocabulary has been trained into the system's lexicon, allowing it to recognize extremely uncommon scientific terms, et al



• The system includes software designed by MIT, that segregates long strings of sentences with common topics into high-level concepts.
  • "Topical transitions are very subtle," says Regina Barzilay, professor of Computer Science at MIT. "Lectures aren't like normal text."
     The software takes (approx) 100-word blocks of text and compares them to calculate the number of overlapping words shared between the text blocks. High repetitions of key terms are given more weight, and chunks with the highest rate of similar words are grouped together.
    

MIT's efforts to optimize the user experience are on-going. In the future, users will have the ability to contribute transcript corrections much like the "Wikipedia process", further improving transcription accuracy.

  Even more impressive: MIT's plans include the ability for the system to learn from these corrections, as they propogate to other transcribed lectures.

A more comprehensive overview can also be read here.