November 17, 1997
Understanding Voice Is The Key
By Edward Cone
Today, you can speak in your natural voice to a computer. Some products, like AVRI's VoiceCommander Pro, let users demarcate sentences and paragraphs, so that they can go straight to a specific page, instead of droning "down, down, down" as required by more basic systems.
But adding functionality is technically daunting and only partially enabled by today's superfast processors. Dragon just announced tape-to-PC dictation capability, a task that's harder than it sounds. "You've got acoustic considerations with tape and feedback," says Matus. "The tape recorder doesn't recognize a problem on the screen, so there is a tremendous risk of cascading errors."
"Recognizing speech is not
the same as understanding speech," Matus points out. "What happens when words are slurred together, or pronounced differently depending on what comes before and what comes after? Getting a computer to understand the difference between `bold that' and the same phrase in a sentence like `it's so important to be bold that...' took a lot of study."
Kevin Schofield, senior program manager in the Microsoft Research speech technology group, says the first significant conversational systems should come out in three to four years. "Right now, you need to know commands. It's like needing to know what to put on the command line in days of DOS," he says. "If you don't know what to stay, you're stuck."
Increased capability will make voice-computing increasingly popular, predicts consultant William Meisel. "Dictation isn't the killer app, but interactivity will be."
Return to story, "
Voice Comes To The Desktop
."
on't expect your v
oice-activated computer to carry on the sort of conversation available to your average starship captain. The next several generations of voice-driven computing won't live up to the Star Trek standard. "It's a long way to get to the 23rd century, but we're ahead of schedule," says Roger Matus, VP of marketing at Dragon Systems.
This Week's Issue
Technology Whitepapers
- Mobile BI: Actionable Intelligence for the Agile Enterprise
- Creating the Enterprise-Class Tablet Environment - by Yankee Group
- How To Regain IT Control In An Increasingly Mobile World - by BlackBerry
- Red Alert: Why Tablet Security Matters - by BlackBerry
- New Visual and Wizard-Driven Paradigms for Exploring Data and Developing Analytic Workflows
