Speech & Language Technology Survey

Bye Bye 2009, new URL

2009-12-29T15:49:00.003+01:00

Good-bye 2009. With you I will close the doors on this blog. At least at its current URL.

After preciously few posts in the past months, in part due to parenthood, in part due to facing new new challenges in academia (both are challenging in their own ways, of course), I have decided to put everything in a new location. I will continue to talk about "news" in speech and language tech, however since these are hard to come by (at least the really good stuff) I want to add a bit of a personal note. More howtos, gotchas, what's-Okko-up-to. Less, whooo-look-who-is-talking-about-speech. I'm sure you know what I mean.

With that, have a happy start to 2010 and please continue to follow at www.okkoblog.com.

Cheers,
Okko

Speech and Dialog Conferences / Speech for iPhone and Android

2009-07-11T10:24:00.008+02:00

Conference time: I will be spending a couple of days in London and Brighton from September 5th attending Interspeech, SIGDIAL as well as a researcher round-table. Anyone interested in meeting up, feel free to get in touch.

Also, here are some more or less recent, interesting news for Android (at about 6:20, thanks Schamai) and iPhone speech developers.

Incrementality in Verbal Interaction

2009-06-18T09:54:00.004+02:00

Since I've joined a research program at Potsdam University end of last year (as a researcher and PhD student), I've decided to use this blog for some additional, more personal updates. This is the first :-).

Our research is concerned with human-machine spoken dialog systems from an incremental, i.e. real-time processing, perspective. As such, members of our team, including me, were recently invited to a workshop on "Incrementality in Verbal Interaction." The workshop brought together an interesting mix of perspectives on incrementality from Psycholinguistics as well as Theoretical and Computational Linguistics. Slides from our project presentation are available here.

Tim O'Reilly: Google Voice Search Key Technology

2009-04-02T11:47:00.006+02:00

ReadWriteWeb reports Tim O'Reilly addressed attendees at the San Francisco Web 2.0 Expo this week, talking about key technologies for the Web >2.0. Voice search (Google iPhone App), he claimed was a tipping point in terms "sensor based interfaces".

While not the only vendor to provide voice search (i.e. Yahoo oneSearch powered by Vlingo) Google certainly seems ahead in the game in what appears to be a gradual unfolding of a broad voice strategy, such as Voice Search and recently rebranding a feature-enhanced GrandCentral as Google Voice. Future work on the voice front we can expect includes promotion of its own speech recognition capacities through Android, Google Gears bringing speech capacities to all browers, tighter integration of Gaudi (audio indexing) with other services and perhaps one day opening up voice services over APIs.

As I've previously pointed out, to Google voice is just another form of data, but what's slowly beginning to emerge is a central role for speech and voice technologies to play in coming developments for the web and how we search and interface with it.

Language Technology April Fools

2009-04-01T11:57:00.004+02:00

Just posting some gems from today concerning speech and language technology, such as natural language generation, speech recognition and natural language processing.

Have you found any others?

Kindle Speech Synthesis

2009-02-26T14:35:00.004+01:00

News about speech and language technology tend to be an in-industry affair, interesting largely to those who need and use it on a daily basis or those who produce (develop or market) it. Every so often however, mainstream news surface that raise issues of broad interest. Google's efforts with speech recognition are an example of this. Last month, Amazon's Kindle 2 e-book reader created a buzz with its text-to-speech "audio book" functionality.

The underlying issue is that Amazon is selling e-books, which can be listened to using speech synthesis, without owning the rights to produce audio book versions. The Authors's Guild argues that this undermines the lucrative audio book market. While it is arguable that a synthesized voice is comparable to the experience of listening to a well-produced audio book, Amazon decided not to fight this one out.

What do you think? Can synthesized audio books provide an experience comparable to real voice productions?

Microsoft Recite Preview - Note Dictation and Voice Search

2009-02-16T08:43:00.006+01:00

Arstechnica reports today on the release of Microsoft Recite "Technology Preview" for Windows Mobile. The applications lets users record short notes as audio snippets, which can later be searched for content by speaking key words. Apparently it does not entail speech recognition rather than simpler pattern matching, meaning it cannot be searched in text form but may work more robustly, eliminating the effort of training for speaker-independency.

While not a full product yet, this sounds like a nifty little application for cognitive off-loading.

Have you tried Microsoft Recite?

More speech on the iPhone

2009-02-08T10:34:00.006+01:00

The iPhone has proved a game-changer in many regards and speech is no exception. Both Google and Yahoo (with vlingo) have deployed mobile speech applications for the iPhone.
Today I came across another sighting of iPhone speech recognition, Vocalia by Creaceed, employing open-source ASR engine Julius for back-end technology. There is no "push to talk" button but a "shake to retry", which may prove useful when recognition goes awry. The app supports French, English and German for now and costs €2.99. Dictation is not available at this point, though Julius is certainly capable of it from an architecture point of view.

Other speech and language related iPhone apps:,

Google Mobile - voice search app
Vlingo - speech-enables your phone
Pocket - language learning app
Voice Dial - speech-enabled dialer
VoiceThis - speech-enabled dialer
iSpeak - multi-language translator with synthesized output
A stuttering aid (not yet available)

Has anyone used these extensively? What is your experience with speech on the iPhone?

Zumba Lumba - iPhone killer or simply a hoax?

2009-02-02T14:56:00.009+01:00

A no-frills phone with the unlikely name of Zumba Lumba has recently received some attention by the BBC. The phone is said to be top-secret, developed by a defense-aviation company. It does without frills like a camera or an applications platform, but touts some interesting security and computational features, (not only) related to speech technology:

Cloud computing - the phone uses no local storage for contacts, data.
Network speech recognition - user input is recognized over the internet. This should avoid hardware intensive local computing for voice input, but requires internet access.
Voice identification - enhanced security, because the phone will only respond to a single user's voice.

Some seem to think this is a potential iPhone killer at least in terms of making use of innovative input modalities (though Google already released a speech recognition app for the iPhone.) Others simply thinks it's a hoax.

Either way, the idea of joining mobile with cloud computing is interesting. Using voice identification for security has its appeal as well, even if it's unclear whether keeping data in the cloud and sending voice data over the internet is any more secure than simply keeping data on your phone, locally.

SVOX purchases Siemens AG speech-related IP

2009-01-26T19:59:00.006+01:00

Following Nuance's acquisition of IBM speech technology intellectual property two weeks ago, Zurich-based SVOX today announced the purchase of the Siemens AG speech recognition technology group. The deal gears at creating "obvious synergies of developing TTS, ASR and speech dialog solutions" and enhances SVOX's portfolio of technologies, which to date included only highly specialized speech synthesis solutions, to now entail speech recognition.
Like the Nuance-IBM deal (and unlike the Microsoft acquisition of TellMe), this merger breaks with the obvious big-fish small-fish paradigm. Here, a larger company's (IBM, Siemens) R&D division was sold to a smaller, more specialized company (SVOX, Nuance).
Both transactions come with an intend to pursue development of novel interactive voice applications. However while Nuance announced the potential development of applications across platforms and environment with IBM expertise and IP, SVOX appears to stay on course with its successful line of automotive solutions to build "a commanding market share in speech solutions for premium cars".

This deal adds SVOX to a list of companies offering network and embedded speech recognition technologies, also including Nuance, Telisma, Loquendo and Microsoft. Financial terms of the deal were not announced.

Nuance acquires IBM speech patents

2009-01-16T08:42:00.005+01:00

Nuance yesterday announced the acquisition of speech-related patents from IBM. The deal encompasses a "licensing and technical services agreement", with IBM continuing to support existing customers. Integrated solutions of the two companies' technologies are expected in two years time, according to the press release.

This deal represents a further step in market consolidation, which Nuance has pursued via a number of mergers and acquisitions over the past years. Friends in the industry tell me IBM has been trying to market their suite of IVR voice application server software more aggressively, however speech research activity, once part of the company's "pervasive computing" vision, has declined lately.

Perhaps the IBM vision will bear fruit at Nuance, as the announcement comes with a commitment " to proliferate advanced speech capabilities across a broad range of devices and environments". One thing is sure: much like Nuance's recent acquisition of Philips voice products, years after taking over Philips IVR products and solutions, this deal represents another closure, as Nuance has been marketing and supporting IBM's ViaVoice product line for years. The de facto number of competitors on the speech and voice technology market is shrinking, as applications become more mainstream.

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IBM Predicts Talking Web

2008-11-28T09:19:00.000+01:00

IBM's annual crystal ball list of Innovations That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years includes a forecast of a voice-enabled talking web. "You will be able to sort through the Web verbally to find what you are looking for and have the information read back to you," the article predicts.
IBM itself has launched several voice-enabled products and initiatives over the years, most notably the WebSphere Voice family of web servers, which adds various voice functionality to its flagship WebSphere platform, leveraging it in areas such as unified messaging and call-center automation.
Some problems exist with a vision as the one advocated by the article. Speech recognition accuracy and noise filtering have obviously come a long way and may only pose a minor impediment. The user's desire to speak rather than type or click is another problem. Issuing voice commands in the presence of others may not always be desirable and can be disruptive, for instance at work on public transport. Lastly, there are usability concerns, beyond the quality of speech technology, when converting a visual 2- or even 3-dimensional representation of information into a 1-dimensional audio stream. The cognitive load increases significantly with tasks more complex than, for instance, obtaining time-table information or finding the nearest Italian restaurant.
The effort that stands behind the vision, to put voice technology to uses beyond call-center automation, is laudable. Mobile internet access and computing on-the-road may indeed do their parts to make this vision come true. And clearly, there are use cases, such as improved accessibility for users with impairments, that on their own accord merit making the web voice-accessible. Wide-spread usage of a voice-enabled web, however, may be more than five years off.

Google Mobile iPhone App with Speech Recognition

2008-11-18T07:51:00.002+01:00

Google released a new feature for its Google Mobile iPhone Application yesterday: voice search. Users speak a query and the application returns search results formatted for the iPhone. This is similar to the GOOG411 directory assistance application, which allows users to call a phone number, speak a query and receive information about local listings in voice or SMS formats. However the new application apparently performs recognition locally on the iPhone, meaning it comes bundled with an embedded speech recognition engine.

Aside from GOOG411, during the US presidential Google released Gaudi, a voice indexing technology for video. That makes the iPhone app the third official service the company releases, making use of speech recognition, leaving one guessing when Google's speech technology becomes available as API, like the Google AJAX Language API for translation and transliteration, rather than bundled as software services. Also, an Android version is probably in the works, one would guess.

All applications are available in US English for now.

Nuance buys Philips Speech Recognition Systems

2008-10-02T11:11:00.001+02:00

Nuance announced this week its acquisition of Philips Speech Recognition Systems. This represents another step in a series of acquisition by the speech technology giant towards market and portfolio expansion. In 2002, Scansoft Inc., which through further mergers and acquisitions became today's Nuance, already acquired Philips' network speech processing group, though not its dictation unit. With this weeks acquisition, the dictation unit will be incorporated into Nuance's already strong dictation portfolio, expanding especially on European healthcare markets, the company announced. Highlights of the purchase include increasing customer base, language & solutions portfolios, distribution channels as well as a great leap forward in international expansion.

Google Showcases Audio Indexing with Gaudi

2008-09-19T08:37:00.000+02:00

Google Labs opened GAudi this week to showcase its new audio indexing technology.

Google GAudi allows searching for keywords/phrases in the audio-stream of selected YouTube videos. Matches are represented as yellow slots on the playback slider. Top results appear as snippets of text from the audio surrounding the search term as well as information how many minutes into the video the term occurred.

The video material chosen to showcase GAudi is material concerning this year's US presendential elections as "part of a broader effort around politics", but also because of the high performance with such material and the relevance to testers and users.

Indexing does not appear to be complete, as using randomly chosen text fragments from showcased videos did not always result in a match. Google does say Gaudi is using its own speech recognition engine, perhaps the same employed by GOOG411, though most FAQs about technical details and how one could use GAudi for video are directed to email inquiries.

While GAudi is showcasing campaign material, it seems only a matter of time before audio indexing will be available for serving ad content on video.

Microsoft Windows Live Messenger Translation Bot

2008-09-08T08:50:00.000+02:00

In the wake of Google's release of its Chrome web-browser, speculation on plans for Chrome on other platforms, including Android have drifted ashore. Naturally this has washed aside much recent IE8 news, which, though not a game-changer, is said to introduce many of the much-needed improvements everyone has been looking for from Microsoft.

In light of the browser war raging, a little add-on for Microsoft's Live Messenger may not stir many waters, even if it promises real-time chat translation between English and 14 other languages. However it is still refreshing to read about technology, which is geared at opening channels of communication, rather than capturing market shares.

What are Google's plans with Chrome and Android viz. Microsoft IE on Windows Mobile? Will Microsoft leverage its non-browser language services such as translation and speech recognition like Google has been?

OnMobile buys Telisma

2008-05-19T10:30:00.001+02:00

OnMobile Global Ltd today acquired France-based Telisma, a producer of speech recognition software for network/telephony environments.
The acquisition comes at a time after OnMobile recently partnered with Nuance, a Telisma competitor for speech recognition markets, to deploy voice search applications for its home market, India. India's multilingual market has made it a tough one to crack for speech technology companies, though a lucrative one as India has recently surpassed the U.S. as the second largest mobile market in the world, according to Om Malik at GigaOm.
I suspect issues specific to speech technology and India's multilingualism have something to do with this deal. As I recently pointed out, internationalization of speech and language technologies comes at a steep entry cost, due to the high demands on expertise and data required for building language-specific models. In addition, speech recognition companies like Nuance have long kept their language models under wraps. In other words, if your language isn't catered to, reaching that language's customer base becomes a very pricey affair.
While open-source aspirations to build freely availably language models for speech recognition exist, Telisma has opted on middle-ground in this matter by allowing partners/customers to build their own models, but selling the tools to do so at a price. In a market like India, the ability to cater to a multi-lingual customer base without purchase of expensive proprietary software (or paying someone else to develop proprietary software for you to purchase) may have made a big difference in this deal.

On a different note, this acquisition is the latest in a series of acquisitions consolidating the speech technology market. While five years ago telephony speech technology was a highly redundant market of small companies building similar products, today they have largely been acquired by or merged with bigger players. In the meantime, companies like Microsoft, IBM, Siemens and Google are making their own moves to enter the market.

Update:
Telismas acoustic modelling toolkit is indeed not for sale, but for free, as one reader has pointed out. Thanks!

Internationalization and Speech Technologies

2008-05-05T07:50:00.000+02:00

The not-so-subtle truth is, of course, that we all speak English. Yet localization and internationalization are at once prerequisite and stumbling stone for many web-based endeavors.

In my own backyard, two examples illustrate the effect and need for of internationalization, respectively. German professional social network XING has internationally outperformed competitors like LinkedIn through early and aggressive internationalization. StudiVZ - the "German Facebook" has gained much of the student social network market before Facebook decided to release a German version of its web app, making this a tough-to-crack market.

Ironically, as these two examples underline, the need for localization remains in cases where the demands on usability are low (join group/contact person/send message) and the target audience can largely be expected to speak sufficient English (read this for an interesting take on the same issues and solutions in online gaming.) Moreover, localization is an effort far greater than providing an interface in the local language.

As one expects, localization and internationalization and speech technology are inextricably linked - in a sense developing speech technologies is internationalization. And using such technology in professional service projects is akin to building a internationalized web application. Here are some of the oddities I've observed while working with speech technologies in an international environment:

Translation is not enough. When you write software that speaks or wants to be spoken to, there is more at stake than providing interface text. Can you expect all your users to spell input when your system doesn't understand the raw speech input? Can you be sure that all your translated content will generate well-formed speech-synthesis output? Language and culture are sensitive issues, so a well-localized speech application must do more than provide translated user interface. Employing local staff is usually a minimum to building a speech application for a new market.

The cost shifts. Re-usability of resources from previous speech projects is usually low. So unlike localizing a web application, porting a speech application requires grunt work that you thought you had done the first time around. Moreover, speech applications in new languages almost always come with additional licensing burdens and questions about the appropriate technology partner. Expect to pay for things you didn't expect.

There is no long tail. The buy-in costs for developing a new language in almost any speech or language technology (recognition, synthesis, translation) remain constant. This makes every newly developed language a strategic decision and translates into a two-tier localization effort: one developing basic technologies, one employing such technology in professional service projects.
As an example, the world's most successful dictation software packages: Dragon Naturally Speaking ships in five flavors of English and six European languages. Philip's Speech Magic ships in 23 dialects of 11 languages. Both a far cry from world-coverage.
The enormous cost of development has a decided effect on developing speech technology for lesser-spoken languages. And it has posed a significant hurdle as well for open-source initiatives of speech technologies to provide such resources for free.

The Times Reports & Is SciFi Really Wrong?

2008-01-27T09:56:00.000+01:00

The New York Times today published an interesting, if brief, article about speech recognition in the mobile/telco space - cited as a "$1.6 billion market in 2007". The article provides a brief overview of a range of applications and mashups, such as vlingo.com and SimulScribe as well as some directory assistance services (but omitting some others such as SpinVox, GOOG411), that use voice.
The article opens:

"Innovation usually needs time to steep. Time to turn the idea into something tangible, time to get it to market, time for people to decide they accept it. Speech recognition technology has steeped for a long time"

And concludes:

"Even a digital expert [...] cautions that some people may never be satisfied with the quality of speech recognition technology — thanks to a steady diet of fictional books, movies and television shows featuring machines that understand everything a person says, no matter how sharp the diction or how loud the ambient noise."

But isn't this a bit hackneyed? Perhaps by today's standards a twenty-year steeping period seems long, but this is hardly the case anywhere else in history. And after re-watching 1982's Blade Runner recently, I actually felt rather optimistic that we are today close to what the movie's expectations for speech recognition and speaker verification were for 2019. Elsewhere , a similar picture emerges.
The Star Trek ship computer's speech recognition engine (the year is 2151), while accurate, stills require the push of a button to kick in, rather than listening for the hot word "computer", a capacity available , if not quite ripe for deployment, today.
Of course, there are the HALs (2001), Marvins (no date), C3P0s (Long long time ago...), whose capacities far exceed that, which we dare dream our mobile phones can one day understand. But here it seems the problem is less about the quality of speech technology - the quality of HAL's speech synthesis is available today, and Marvin's characteristic monotone baritone should be easy to do - rather than about the old hard-soft divide in Artificial Intelligence. As long as we use a hard-AI problem, which speech arguably is, to solve soft-AI problems ("find closest pizza service") we cannot fail to be disappointed.

GOOG: We need more data

2008-01-03T09:42:00.000+01:00

The old maxim "I need more data" should be familiar to anyone who has ever tried to wrestle with language technology issues, attempted speech application tuning or delved into any statistical approach to an AI-related problem. Google moved into the speech world last year with GOOG-411, a speech recognition driven directory assistance application (you say what you are looking for and where, it returns suitable businesses and connects you to the one you want or sends you details in an SMS).
Like all (well, most) other Google services, GOOG-411 is free for the end-user. As such, the basic business model (collect data, turn data into cash) applies. This was recently confirmed in interview by Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of Search Products and User Experience:

Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.

Google thus couples statistical AI and its general data-driven approach to everything in a novel way. In doing so, Google may find itself in a catch-up race with the ilk of Nuance, Loquendo IBM, or Telisma, whose stronghold on speech recognition technology comes, in part, from having aggregated speech and language databases through data collection during professional services projects.
What's new in Google's approach, however, is the convergence of the dual role that data plays in AI and in the overall service-driven business model. Google will presumably not be content to bootstrap a pattern matching engine to sell licenses like the technology companies above. More interestingly to follow will be the range of services Google can spin using this technology (context sensitive video advertising, audio indexing, IVR hosting) which are more befitting of their overall company strategy.
Unsurprisingly, Mayer goes on to claim that Google isn't working on ways out of the world of brute-force data-driven algorithms:

People should be able to ask questions, and we should understand their meaning, or they should be able to talk about things at a conceptual level. ... A lot of people will turn to things like the semantic Web as a possible answer to that. But what we're seeing actually is that with a lot of data, you ultimately see things that seem intelligent even though they're done through brute force.

User privacy advocates may also have a thought or two on this new dimension of data collection, as Google is beginning to loose the "conventionally trustworthy" image it held amongst many over the past years. Fortunately the ways in which speech data is commonly used to train pattern matching models involves very little in the ways of privacy infringement.
Happy data collecting!

News Redux & Building VoiceGlue

2007-12-04T08:12:00.000+01:00

I stumbled across some "traditional" news bits this week for speech and language technologies, representing most of the major and a few interesting minor market players . Yahoo is offering some kind of NLP-driven structured search for e-commerce solutions starting next year. A new bundled automatic translation software with automatic learning capabilities was announced by across Systems GmbH and Language Weaver. Loquendo is sponsoring a speech-for-in-car-navigation industry event. Persay, maker of voice authentication software, is shipping solutions securing Planet Payment's voice-enabled payment processing. Lastly Nuance, continuing its acquisition spree, buys Viecore, a contact-center integration consulting company, indicating a clear focus on strengthening its traditional speech and telephony market position.

Recently I stumbled across and blogged about VoiceGlue, an integration of various GPL-licensed pieces of software, providing full IVR capabilities (including rudimentary speech synthesis but not recognition.) Well, last night, together with Christoph, I finally had a stab at it myself.
Our test setup involved running Fedora 9 virtualized in Mac OS X. Our Fedora installation was missing a few pieces of software beyond the indicated prerequisites, but after about an hour everything was under way.
The trickiest bit proved to be building various modules required for the XML parser (I presume needed later for VoiceGlue-customized DTMF grammar parser.) For some reason CPAN's console kept conking out on us (claiming inexplicably missing/unbuildable prereqs), so after wrestling with that for some time, we decided to manually build all the modules ourself (hoorah, makefiles).
This worked like a charm, though we hit a snag with the Module::Build perl module, which required C_Support, which in turn required another perl module (ExtUtils-CBuilders), not mentioned in any documentation (scant across the board, though that's half the fun, isn't it).
After that, the VoiceGlue installation completed swiftly and all services started running after a minimal bit of configuration.
Next week we'll be back with some test calls and our first impressions. In the meanwhile we'll keep our eyes peeled for ASR integration (LumenVox/Sphinx), which will make this a truly valuable stab at open sourcing some of the most expensive carrier-grade technology out there.

Assistive and Accessibility Technology

2007-11-21T10:25:00.000+01:00

Diligent readers may have noticed that dominant news bits concerning speech and language technologies seem to focus on the cost- or time-saving aspects it. This is understandable, as the big players (Google, Microsoft, Nuance, IBM) have made it their mandate to capture lucrative markets (call center automation, directory assistance). Application of natural language technologies elsewhere, e.g. where it's fun (in games) or necessary (providing accessibility for visually impaired users), seems to lag.
Not so this week. This week seems to shine under the assistive/accessibility technology star. Note Sourceforge project "Speak as Daisy" - a Microsoft Word plugin that enables creation of XML files with markup for speech synthesis or electronic braille generation. The plugin is said to be available in 2008.
Mac users with need for improved document read back in British English will rejoice over the improved Infovox iVox voices.
Philips and Elsevier develop a speech-enabled diagnostic system for Radiologists.
Behold Nattiq's USB Hal Pen, which allows blind users to use the company's accessibility features on any computer with a USB port without installation.
Of course there's some overlap with time-, cost- and money-saving technologies as well. The FBI has announced widespread use of Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking dictation for report and interview transcription.
Lastly, here's an a propos rant against call center automation and frustrated end-users, a target group for speech and language technologies all too often neglected. Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned about usability by the "money savers" employing speech technology, taken from those that rely on speech recognition and synthesis for their daily needs. I don't know, but F-word spotting as a means for prioritizing frustrated callers seems like an acknowledgement of defeat.

Back in the saddle with MSFT, GOOG and VoiceGlue

2007-11-13T12:15:00.000+01:00

Back after an extensive break. Been working hard on some of my own multi-modal ideas. Keep your eyes peeled.
Looks like it's been a quiet fall, speech and language technology-wise. After GOOG-411, Microsoft has also added speech to their search engine endeavors (if in a different domain) by speech-enabling Live Search for mobile users. Nuance continues to consolidate the speech tech market.
Exciting news on the IVR front. Finally a serious attempt to integrate various open-source technologies to provide free carrier-grade speech/telephone services is under way. VoiceGlue has managed to combine OpenVXI (VXML browser), Flite (Speech Synthesis) on Asterisk and is planning to integrate Sphinx2 for speech recognition. All components would then be available under some form of the GPL. Could this herald a change in availability of speech telephone platforms for developers unwilling to dish out horrendous per-port costs? Something to follow, anyway.
Lastly, here's an article describing the growing role of speech in warehouse management.

Google on the Move, News Redux

2007-07-25T09:06:00.000+02:00

Very quiet recently. No big acquisitions, no no speech-tech revolution.

Most interesting: Google announced Mike Cohen (of formerly Nuance) will appear as keynote speaker at SpeechTek in August to reveal Google's speech technology strategy. Google has already moved into the speech application market with GOOG411, an automatic directory assistance application leveraging business search and Google Maps.
UBC researchers announce speech learning system that doesn't use traditional data-driven model to learn the sounds of a language. Instead it is said to represent more experience driven learning, much like infants. So far, the system has acquired English and Japanese vowels.
Some product reviews/announcements: a quick history of desktop dictation, uses of TextAloud for the iPhone, and Nuance's new South African voice "Tessa".
Also on the web: NIST evaluates DARPA automatic translation software in military contexts, and What Semantic Search is Not.

I may post less frequently in coming weeks. Stay tuned.

This week: Bunnies, Trojans and the Jetsons

2007-07-11T11:21:00.000+02:00

There was no shortage of novel uses for speech technology this week. Avaya and the Jersey City's Liberty Science Center announced speech-enabled exhibits, allowing customers to access information and services in the museum using their voice (and, of course, mobile devices).
Gizmo freaks should love (and everyone else should hate) this bunny, displaying speech recognition and synthesis, while also providing some unified communication capacities.
Also novel, though on a sadder note: speech is finally on the malware radar for good, as TTS trojans popped up using Microsoft's builtin text-to-speech engine to annoy users by commenting their own malicious behavior. Call it the salt-in-wound virus. This news comes after about half a year after a MS Vista speech recognition security flaw was revealed, whereby the recognizer enables remote execution of content on a computer running speech recognition.

Traditional speech applications made some headlines this week as well: Nuance signs deal with Damovo to roll out speech apps in Ireland, forecasting €1.5m in profits over the next year. TuVox annouces hosted on-demand speech apps for VOIP access.

Lastly, here is an interesting article about the Jetsons and why speech technology hasn't caught on as much as we have all hoped.

2007-07-03T09:46:00.000+02:00

Slow week in terms of language technology news.
On the gaming front: Nintendo announced they were playing the middleware game for Wii development by opening up the platform to 3rd party technologies. Among the first to sign on was Fonix, allowing game developers to integrate VoiceIn Game edition, their video game console speech recognition and "karaoke" SDK. The karaoke feature seems rather gimmicky, geared only at the karaoke gaming genre, which seems rather niche. Fonix has displayed strong focus on gaming in the past, integrating as Sony PS3 middleware.
Unfortunately, speech in games has never made a big splash, but it represents a refreshing move away from customer service applications. Perhaps the middleware approach of many platform vendors will change things.
Talking about the customer service front: Genesys and Merced Systems team to develop improved reporting tools. Measuring and reporting customer service interaction has made headway recently. Focus on interaction effectiveness of natural language/speech applications intends to help correct some of the poor image that self-service applications live with. Relatedly, this article describes the shortcomings of such applications in the past and proposes a less-is-more, faster interaction paradigm for interactive voice response applications. While not all problems with IVR applications boil down to complicated menu structures and long response times, this is certainly a pointer in the right direction, placing emphasis on dialogue design rather than engineering.
Lastly, showing that not all speech communications is simply about customer service, Voxeo snags Gartners "Cool Vendors in Enterprise Communications, 2007" title, awarded to companies for being among the "interesting, new and innovative".

Nuance, Tegic and the woes and comeback of mobile speech

2007-06-26T08:11:00.000+02:00

So the big news this week is Nuance's acquisition of the month: Tegic. Tegic supplies T9 predictive text input to several mobile phone manufacturers. The acquisition represents Nuance's recent focus on acquiring mobile technology market companies. It serves Nuance with a strategic customer base, including obvious candidates for Nuance's speech technologies. Aside from the strategic benefits, the technical result of mixing predictive text input with speech is interesting and something to be followed.
Coincidentally, the woes and comeback of using speech for I/O on mobile devices are described in these articles this week.
Lastly here is an interesting interview with Lin Chase, director of Accenture R&D in Bangalore, India, who held several prominent positions in the speech tech industry in the past. Topics include speech, women in the industry and why Americans should travel.

Healthcare, Security and the Army...

2007-06-20T10:25:00.000+02:00

...these are the three overarching themes of the speech technology news that I came across this week. There are some obvious and less obvious points of contact here:

In the Army: for those who watched Air Wolf in the 80s, voice-controlled aircraft systems are being tested on UK Army helicopters.
Healthcare-military solution of the week: US Army hospital deploys speech enabled self-service telephone application.
Some pure healthcare: UK study finds outlook on radiological reporting using speech recognition positive. Also, Bayer employs MedScan NLP technology for information extraction of biomedical literature.
Three security applications of language technology his week: a password reset application employing speaker verification wins award, a Brazilian bank looking to employ SV for financial services applications and a university campus emergency response system using speech synthesis.

Speech Meets Sales, Video Gaming and the Economist reports...

2007-06-12T09:29:00.000+02:00

Many of those working in speech recognition, especially deploying customer-service telephone application, have grown tired the limited scope that most projects entail. I recently wrote about speech enabled knowledge bases as a novel type of speech app. In what may be another - at least I haven't heard this before - MTI and FasTrak Retail combine efforts to launch a 'virtual sales associates' platform. And of course there are the recurring dreams of voice enabled video gaming.

Speech synthesis is naturally more diverse than its recognition sibling (perhaps not everything 'I' in I/O can be channelled through voice, but pretty much everything 'O' can be synthesized.) In todays news, TTS is employed in emergency response systems to broadcast text messages as audio.

Lastly, speech got some rep in the Economist June 7th issue.

Germany-based and search-engines-driven language technology

2007-06-08T10:08:00.000+02:00

There has been lot's of German-based language technology news over the past couple of weeks:

Ulm University in Germany and SpeechCycle parter to develop novel natural language VXML solutions.
German semgine GmbH secures capital for improved Web3.0 applications, including market-specific, such as biomedical knowledge.
Berlin-based Lautmaler VUI-design and speech technology experts go online.

Also some attention on language-technology-related search engine news:

Red Herring roundup of Semantic Technology Conference last month.
Google adds multilingual search capacity using Google Translate.
Some speculation on whether video advertisers with enhanced NLP capacities are next in Googles acquisition cross-hairs.

Weekly New Redux...

2007-05-22T09:17:00.000+02:00

Today, I came across some novel(ish) uses for text-to-speech:

Security: Campus emergency notification system employs TTS for playback of notifications, sent to student/staff phones.
Accessibility: 'Seeingeyephone' NFC application reads product information to users

On the mainstream speech recognition front:

Voxeo releases new developer packages, claiming improved internationalization, availability.
As a reminder of a sadder hour of the industry, Lernout and Houspie goes on trial this week.

And some Web3.0 language tech news:

This week at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose...

News are back...

2007-05-20T08:39:00.000+02:00

Ok, I'm back from vacation and finally sorted through some of the recent developments in the speech world. Going forward I will probably post longer but less frequent tidbits here.

Biggest recent speech news is the acquisition of VoiceSignals, broadening their mobile end user market as well as adding some nifty voice features in short messaging and mobile phone usability.
On related news, here is a short article describing the role of speech in unified messaging.
Lastly, here is a description of progress on open-source telephony and speech recognition.

Speech Enabled Knowledge Bases

2007-04-24T10:21:00.000+02:00

Two articles and a product showcase recently demonstrated speech-enabled knowledge base solutions. In essence products/solutions such as this are expert systems with various degrees of complexity, ranging from speaking manuals to complex diagnosis systems. Users can describe a problem and ultimately receive an answer, whether through complex one-shot natural language processing/understanding or a plain-old, multi-step directed dialogue.
Alongside traditional call-center automation applications - e.g. customer service, process automation, pre-qualification, directory assistance - these systems represent a minor market segment. However they are relatively novel, so much can still happen. Especially in medical/health care domains, the market appears untapped and the list of potential applications broad.

Daily News Redux...

2007-04-20T11:55:00.000+02:00

Today on the WWW:

Several embedded TTS news articles, including accessibility, navigation and usability features.
LingvoSoft announce web-based translation services, including readback of translation using TTS.

Daily News Redux...

2007-04-19T12:36:00.000+02:00

On the WWW today:

Company provides podcast of printed news using synthesised speech.
White-paper about benefits of speech recognition in the retail market.

Daily News Redux...

2007-04-18T11:25:00.000+02:00

On the WWW today:

Some recent news about Google and MS voice search offensive.
Epson chip to feature Fonix DECtalk speech synthesis.

Daily News Redux...

2007-04-17T08:04:00.000+02:00

On the WWW today:

Article providing roundup of some semantic web solutions.
InQuira executive to discuss benefits of NLP for search engine optimization.

Daily News Redux...

2007-04-16T10:17:00.000+02:00

Today on the WWW:

Software Ali Baba parses medical abstracts, generates visual network or terminology using natural language processing.
A redux of latent semantic indexing (LSI) for use in search engines.

Daily News Redux...

2007-04-11T11:05:00.000+02:00

Today on the WWW:

Nuance announces voice search framework, based on directory assistance solutions portfolio.
Epson releases speech synthesis chip, powered by Fonix engine, allows mixed output of synthesis and pre-recorded speech.
Loquendo text-to-speech gives speech to Activa Multimedia iVAC avatars.

Daily News Redux...

2007-04-10T10:45:00.000+02:00

Today on the WWW:

Haley 6.0, a business rules management system, allows business rules extraction using natural language processing.
Uses of voice-enabled wikis.

Web 3.0 and Natural Language Processing

2007-04-09T08:53:00.000+02:00

Web 3.0 is getting some buzz in the blogosphere. Like Web 2.0, it begs the question that PCMag.com recently ran by its readers: what is it? However this time around things seems a bit easier.

Web 2.0 seems to be happy with being vaguely defined (delimited may be a better term) and equally a social and a technological movement. Web 3.0 clearly hovers over the idea of the "Semantic Web", a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, in which richly mark-upped hypertext and data allow for novel more meaningful human-machine and machine-machine communication. Radar Networks (currently in stealth mode) claim to be driving some interesting developments in this direction and are followed closely by those interested.

This has already raised some questions: will content be expensive hand labor or machine boot-strappable, what new privacy policies do we have to live with, how does one separate style and content, what are alternatives to RDF.

Sadly, there's very little inspiring out there about potential applications.

My question (though not uniquely mine) to add to this: What role will natural language processing play in this (i.e. how "semantic" is this talk of Semantics)? Semantic content in RDF appears to be little more than a means for one machine to tell another who authored a particular book or what are the postal codes in the greater Boston area. Semantics to me is as much about intentions ("Why is web-service A dispensing such information?") and interpreting such information for the purposes of action ("What can web-service B - or my browser or I - do with it?").

Perhaps this misses the mark and semantic really isn't about natural language. But there is a weaker, more real form of this "language and technology" concern: Insofar as semantics is just information, can it be bootstrapped by a machine (perhaps even linguistically informed rather than statistically)?

Thoughts?

Daily News Redux...

2007-04-05T10:47:00.000+02:00

On the WWW today:

Wizzard provides new Skype extra for contact list management, featuring custom TTS announcemens and alerts.
TransClick and ChatStats provide on-the-fly translation of IM chats.

Daily News Redux...

2007-04-03T15:40:00.001+02:00

Daily News Redux:

Some electronic dictionary news. Coolsoft Coolexon electronic dictionary features 60 languages, including translation and TTS accessibility features, is only 3.3MB large. Also in the news, Ultralingua and Collins partner to release electronic dictionaries.
Some business automation success stories using speech recognition.
Some more semantic search engine-related news featuring ZoomInfo and Cognition.
Arab language speech recognition market growing.
Wizzard announces 2006 financial results.

Questions of the day:

Web X.0 IEEE workshop. What role will NLP play?
Are GPS navigation systems driving the TTS market (links randomly chosen from recent navigation system releases)?

Daily News Redux...

2007-04-03T10:42:00.000+02:00

On the WWW today:

CallMiner announces Eureka product for call center speech analytics and QA.
Envox CT Connect 7 VXML/CTI plattform now Avaya telephony compliant
Some blogging about the role of symbolic vs brute-force statistics in articificial intelligence, NLP, Google's machine translation vision.

Daily News Redux...

2007-04-02T10:35:00.000+02:00

On the WWW today:

Speech technology key factor for 2007 CRM magazine service awards.
PepsiAmerica s employs speech-enabled unified messaging.

Daily News Redux...

2007-04-01T08:47:00.000+02:00

On the WWW today:

LumenVox announces 400th Asterisk PBX developer employing LumenVox ASR Engine.
VoiceSignal announces Blackberry 8800 integration.
Talking Technologies announce real-time speech-to-speech translation software.
Microsoft PBX with ASR. News seems older, and subsequent of MS's TellMe acquisition.

Daily News Redux...

2007-03-31T08:01:00.000+02:00

On the WWW today:

Gamasutra reports Fonix earnings. Fonix ASR engine recently received attention after integration on various gaming platforms.
Wireless Linux penguin robot features Acapela TTS.
Genesys and Avaya make more news on the multi-modal voice service plattforms featuring video support.

Have a good weekend!

Daily News Redux...

2007-03-30T09:45:00.000+02:00

On the WWW today:

Rogers Wireless Canada and Nuance parter for mobile services.
across Systems unveils localization and translation web-client software.
Nuance Focus acquisition closes.
Genesys launches multi-modal voice and video plattform.
DMG Consulting publishes speech analytics report, predicts huge growth and improved call center QA.

Daily News Redux...

2007-03-29T11:57:00.000+02:00

On the WWW today:

Article about Google statistical machine translation algorithms, mentions success in Arabic (cf. NIST benchmarks finding Google's Arabic/Chinese->English translation most accuracte.)
Teragram MyGAD.com search engine launch, employing NLP for improved information retrieval. In related news, a list of top-100 search engines, including more NLP and some audio searches.
Article about predicive software application for the tourism industry, calls for NLP and other AI techniques such as neural networks.
Nuance unveils voice music search application for mobile ASR applications. In related news, Nuance ships improved mobile TTS.

Three Observations about Recent Language Technology News

2007-03-28T13:50:00.000+02:00

To start us off, recent experience has shown three things:

Speech (i.e. voice) related news is TTS-dominated, less so by ASR.
The company featured most frequently in the news is Nuance.
The talk of semantic search engines seems to dominate the NLP news.

The success of TTS is largely due to requirements set by mobile and in-car technologies, especially GPS and communications. The future of ASR in the other hand seems to depend on the dictation market (especially in the healthcare sector) and a growing relevance of network ASR (driven by advancing VoIP, impact of multi-modal applications).

Nuance's continued position will depend on the role of "super players" IBM and Microsoft and to a lesser degree the role of open-source initiatives, especially on the network/telephony side.

Semantic search engines recently got some media hype with "Google-Killer" Powerset, a PARC offspring. While in its infancy, some believe this development towards semantic web will usher in a Web3.0 revolution. Of course, soem others believe this has already begun, while yet more just wanna see what happens with all this.

Let's see how these trends develop. Especially multi-modality and semantic searches will be issues to follow closely.

Welcome

2007-03-28T13:24:00.000+02:00

Welcome. Here I will follow what the news and other blogs have to say about what may broadly be called human language technology. These include, but aren't limited to, automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), speaker recognition/verification (SV), machine translation (MT) and natural language processing (NLP).

Oh and of course: this blog is intended to be informative and, unless otherwise specified, makes no claim about the truthfulness of any referenced material. I will do my best to ensure that any of my own opinions can easily be discerned as such. Comments and debate are always welcome.