speech

Last November, I wrote a post titled "Top 10 technology flops." One of the 10 was speech recognition. Judging by the feedback I got from all over the Web, you'd think I'd said Apple was a flop or Bush was a great president.

What I meant, at the time, was that I was disappointed that we're not rid of all the keyboards, buttons, and remote controls by now. So I did some research and discovered that speech technology is indeed proliferating in some industries: defense, medical, call centers, and rudimentary capability for cell phones, edutainment, and high-end automobiles.

That said, I don't really care that American Airlines can recognize my voice responses on the phone. The only speech application that actually benefits me on a day-to-day basis is on my cell phone, and that's pretty basic stuff.

For the most part, we're still banging away on computer keyboards and drowning in a sea of proprietary consumer electronics devices and remote controls.

And now I know why. When it comes to speech technology, one company is holding just about all the cards: Nuance Communications.

Courtesy of dozens of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) over the past 13 years, Nuance now owns much of the speech technology on planet Earth. The company boasts a $3.5 billion market cap on annual sales that will likely top $800 million this fiscal year but, remarkably, has never been profitable. I can see why. Nuance has been so busy acquiring companies it hasn't had a chance to worry about a little thing like profitability.… Read more

If you're already bored of getting English translated to Mandarin through JaJah, TwitterFone, another mobile service with voice recognition savvy, has put out a neat update that's sure to burn through your mobile phone minutes. You can now listen to the last 10 tweets from your Twitter pals and respond to any of them that you'd like using the same speech-to-text system in place for publishing tweets of your own.

It's certainly not as fast or easy to parse voice messages as the mobile version of Twitter (m.twitter.com), but if you're on an … Read more

Listening to MP3s of robotic voices reading stories from the Web is a good way to prepare for the eventual downfall of mankind at the hands of our robotic overlords. If you're into that kind of thing, Hearwho will do all the heavy lifting for you by converting any text you feed it into a downloadable MP3 file.

If you've spent hours amusing yourself playing with AT&T's text-to-speech demo, you'll be glad to know that Hearwho does away with the somewhat annoying 300-character limit. I dumped an entire 800-word story into the text box … Read more

For years, people have wondered when they would be able to voice a command to a digital device, have it understand the query, and respond with some degree of intelligence. That day still isn't here, but speech-technology companies like Nuance are working on it.

On Tuesday, Nuance, maker of Dragon Naturally Speaking for the desktop, said that it has developed a prototype for voice search on Apple's iPhone. In August, the company plans to start selling a downloadable application for the iPhone that lets them speak a question to the phone to retrieve search results from Google or … Read more

Who doesn't like listening to computer generated human voices for hours at a time? If you're a fan of Microsoft Sam, you should check out Dixero, a service that turns RSS feeds into podcasts you can subscribe to and listen to on your computer or portable devices. The company is showing of its products at this week's Web 2.0 Expo, despite the incredibly noisy show floor.

The listening quality is about the same as Odiogo, a service I looked at a few months back and have used with great success on blogs and news sites that … Read more

SpeechGear's Compadre suite of translation software brings us one step closer the sci-fi ideal of a universal translator. The full suite of five programs gives you the ability to instantly translate anything you see, hear, or read into a ton of languages, including Spanish, German, Dutch, Iraqi, Chinese, Japanese, and more.

The most exciting portion of the software is Interact, which lets you have a near-real-time conversation with a speaker of a foreign language. You and your conversant simply speak into a microphone that's connected to your computer; the program uses voice recognition, machine translation, and speech synthesis … Read more

A German politician recently sued Wikipedia to have images related to the Third Reich removed from the site. Then she changed her mind and withdrew the complaint, after vehement disapproval by her own party. But she's still campaigning to have an Internet-wide agreement not to use or display "anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, and extreme right positions."

It's not just Wikipedia: Yahoo, YouTube, and eBay have all occasionally drawn criticism (and legal action) for providing information and documents from Nazi Germany.

Where should Web sites draw the line between documenting the truth and providing fuel for hate movements?… Read more

Here's a neat service for blog owners who want to add another layer of distribution for their content. It's called Odiogo, and it will take any written blog entries and turn them into spoken word. It uses an integrated player that sticks itself on top of every blog post, and lets readers listen to any post in lieu of reading.

I came across the service while reading a post on UNEASYsilence about hacking the new eeePCs to run a hacked version OS X Leopard (which apparently runs about as well as it can on the aged processor), and … Read more

The next U.S. Air Force maverick may be talking to her plane instead of looking at its dash for updates.

The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, which the Air Force plans to roll out in 2008, will be the first U.S. fighter to respond to voice commands, the Air Force announced Wednesday.

The Air Force Research Laboratory's Human Effectiveness Directorate has been working on the idea for some time, trying out different systems from a variety of companies.

After years of testing, it now has a speech-recognition system that works from a microphone within a pilot'… Read more