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Is now time for talk and tech?
By Nick Easen for CNN
(CNN) -- Many of us will testify to paying bills or ordering products by growling responses down the telephone to a stream of automated voice prompts. Voice-activation and speech technology is nothing new, even a decade ago journalists optimistically wrote that voice input was just around the corner. Yet this time, it might actually be true -- computer power has shot up; memory is cheap; Internet-focused standards are emerging; integration with all types of data is possible and voice technology has vastly improved. "The availability of accurate speech recognition and human-sounding text-to-speech technologies has revitalized the industry," John Joseph from voice specialists Envox told CNN. With the growth of wireless and smaller mobile devices voice technology has risen in importance. Keyboards have also become less suitable for interfacing with data and the Web. This has led to a new and rapidly growing market referred to as voice solutions. Hunt-and-peck typists and sufferers of PC repetitive stress injury may soon see relief through speech activated devices -- after all voice has been around much longer than the 130-year-old qwerty keyboard. "If you had a voice activated PC why wouldn't you use it? Voice recognition is already much better than writing recognition technology," says Fergus O' Rorke from Firebrand Communications told CNN. "These days the technology can understand voice algorithms or speech patterns very well, but it needs a killer application -- then everyone will be talking about it," adds O' Rorke. Our natural languageAs executives become increasingly mobile and global in their work, they're also demanding computing platforms so they can access crucial data at any time and anywhere. "The speech technology landscape has changed enormously in the past year. We've left behind the days of "press one for yes", "press two to bypass this message." Dealing with a speech-enabled agent on the phone is becoming increasingly common," Harriet Ip from IBM told CNN. Even though voice activation has yet to reach our desktops, many businesses are already using it. Speech integration technology in call centers has saved costs and replaced operators and agents. In the finance and telecoms industry, where it is most used, voice-enhanced services interact with Web sites, company databases and transaction systems. One French mobile phone provider, K-mobile, now uses a voice portal so subscribers can get news and sports scores, as well as order taxis. Carmakers Honda use speech-enabled navigation allowing drivers to better keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. "Cars have no keyboards, neither do your consumer appliances that makes speech the most logical interface," says Ip. Belgium-based Ticket BBL travel agents now use smart phone responses to generate business leads. The system obtains information from a caller, matches it with company data, checks agent availability and connects the call. The emergence of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), Voice XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and Microsoft's Speech and Language Tags (SALT) is also making it easier to develop new voice-based programs. IBM, has been researching speech for decades, by 2010 IBM's Super Human speech project aims to recognize the spoken word better than humans do. It is also working on Multi-modality -- or the ability to use speech and say, graphics, in the same interaction. Speech prompt will eventually bring up visuals instead of a voice response. Microsoft Corp. is also in on the act. It recently announced a beta version of its Microsoft Speech Server, which integrates speech for telephony applications. With all these developments some day soon speech technology will be part of our everyday office lives.
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