From...

October 28, 1999
Web posted at: 12:00 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT)

by Aoife McEvoy

NEW YORK (IDG) -- The message is loud and clear at this week's SpeechTEK 99 show: Speech technology is not just about talking to your PC anymore.

"'Dictation' is a dirty word," says Richard Gallahan, director of sales support and speech projects at Philips Speech Processing.

Instead, you'll find speech technology spreading to smart phones and other wireless devices, and everywhere on the Internet.

Gallahan and others emphasized that we'll soon see more voice-enabled Web transactions using natural language. (For instance: "Hi, I want to book a flight from Chicago to Miami on Friday.")

	ALSO
Chatpage - "Ozzie" Osborne

Executives from Motorola, Lucent, IBM, and AT&T spoke of developments in what's called Voice XML, a markup language for speech on the Internet. These companies joined forces recently to develop a single industry standard.

Practice doesn't make perfect

Despite the rapid advances, industry experts admit that there's a long journey ahead before speech is truly mainstream. "The best technologies are the ones you don't notice," says Volker Steinbiss, chief technology officer at Philips Speech Processing.

MORE COMPUTING INTELLIGENCE
	IDG.net home page
PC World home page
Speak easy: The latest wave of speech-recognition products
Voice recognition to go
Can we talk?
Reviews & in-depth info at IDG.net
		IDG.net's desktop PC page
		IDG.net's portable PC page
IDG.net's Windows software page
IDG.net's personal news page
Year 2000 World
Questions about computers? Let IDG.net's editors help you
Subscribe to IDG.net's free daily newsletter for computer geniuses (& newbies)
Search IDG.net in 12 languages
News Radio
	Fusion audio primers
	Computerworld Minute

And speech isn't there yet -- you pick up on its shortcomings and they're all the more frustrating because expectations are high.

Steinbiss says vendors must educate users about what speech can and can't do. "We need to do a better job of giving people insight into how cooperative they have to be to make it work."

A few years down the road, Steinbiss predicts, speech will be fully integrated into operating systems. When will it be ubiquitous like the mouse? "About ten years from now," Steinbiss says.

Look Ma, no wires

In the meantime, at least you need not be leashed to a headset.

Andrea Electronics announced its $150 DA400 Desktop Array, a stand-alone desktop device. And Emkay unveiled its radio-frequency headset, the $200 RF-5615. Both products will be available in December.

Philips released its $199 Universal Serial Bus version of the SpeechMike Pro, its all-in-one microphone and mouse trackball. The advantage, especially for laptop users, is easy connection: The device ignores the existing sound card setup in the PC completely. But according to Philips, there's no significant increase in accuracy.

Voice It detailed the features coming with its $200 Voice It Mobile Digital Recorder. It will offer options for creating voice prompt fields as you talk into the device (which should be great for lawyers, doctors, and real estate agents). You also get unlimited recording capacity with removable flash memory cards. Voice It bundles this device with IBM's aging ViaVoice 98 but will upgrade to the current ViaVoice Millennium next year.