[real-eyes] Fw: [acb-l] The Coming Wave Of Gadgets That Listen And Obey
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Subject: [acb-l] The Coming Wave Of Gadgets That Listen And Obey
The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey
By MICHAEL FITZGERALD
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: Mike Phillips remembers that in the
1980s,
when he was a Carnegie Mellon graduate student trying to develop rudimentary
speech
recognition systems, "it seemed almost impossible."
Now, devices that incorporate speech recognition are starting to hit the
mass market,
thanks to entrepreneurs like Mr. Phillips. He is the chief technology
officer and
a co-founder of the Vlingo Corporation, an 18-month-old start-up in
Cambridge, Mass.,
that is selling services to cellular carriers and other software companies
that want
to give their customers the ability to let their mouths do the walking - and
the
searching.
Vlingo's service lets people talk naturally, rather than making them use a
limited
number of set phrases. Dave Grannan, the company's chief executive,
demonstrated
the Vlingo Find application by asking his phone for a song by Mississippi
John Hurt
(try typing that with your thumbs), for the location of a local bakery and
for a
Web search for a consumer product. It was all fast and efficient. Vlingo is
designed
to adapt to the voice of its primary user, but I was also able to use Mr.
Grannan's
phone to find an address.
The Find application is in the beta test phase at
AT&T
and Sprint. Consumers who use certain cellphones from those companies can
download
the application from
vlingo.com
.
Mr. Phillips has spent more than 15 years in the trenches at companies that
nourished
speech recognition. In 1994, he was one of the founders of Speechworks,
which made
early interactive voice-response systems, the now-ubiquitous automated
services that
answer when we call a company. In 2000, Speechworks was acquired by
ScanSoft, which
five years later bought
Nuance Communications
,
keeping Nuance as the name. Mr. Phillips left that year to work at
M.I.T.
as a visiting researcher.
In 2006, he and a colleague from ScanSoft, John Nguyen, started Vlingo
because they
thought that speech recognition technology, cellular networks and phones
were all
becoming powerful enough to allow voice navigation systems on cellphones.
"We couldn't
have done this five years ago," he says.
Now, Mr. Phillips is in a race for market share. Another start-up, Yap Inc.,
based
in Charlotte, N.C., is running a beta test of its service, which is similar
to Vlingo's
but already has text messaging. Igor and Victor Jablokov, Yap's co-founders,
decided
to start the company because they saw their teenage sister text-messaging
while in
a car.
She wasn't driving at the time, but Igor Jablokov says cellular companies
tell him
in meetings that two-thirds of their teenage customers have either sent or
read a
text message while behind the wheel.
Big companies are also attracted to this market. Nuance started its Nuance
Voice
Control system last August, the same month that Vlingo's appeared. Nuance's
system
is in use at Sprint and
Rogers Communications
and can be downloaded to 66 models of hand-held phones, with many more on
the way.
Microsoft
is a significant potential competitor, thanks in part to its purchase of
TellMe
Networks last March. TellMe offers a speech-driven search application for
cellphones
that is available to customers of AT&T - only those who were part of
Cingular before
the merger - and Sprint. TellMe's system is built-in on the new Mysto phone
from
Helio, a mobile phone operator started by Earthlink and SK Telecom, and is
the engine
for 1800call411, a free directory information service.
Over all, speech recognition was a $1.6 billion market in 2007, according to
Opus
Research, which predicts an annual growth rate of 14.5 percent over the next
three
years. Dan Miller, an analyst at Opus, said that companies that have
licensed speech
recognition technology would probably see faster revenue growth, as more
consumers
used the technology. The cellphone market holds the most potential, given
its billions
of phones, but cellular providers are still working out the business model
for such
services.
Igor Jablokov, Yap's chief executive, says that he wants his application to
be supported
by advertising, but that the carriers with whom he is negotiating, which he
declined
to name, want to charge customers for the service.
To be sure, speech recognition technology has been available on personal
computers
since 2001 in applications like Microsoft Office, but few people use it. But
in cellphone
and other markets, speech recognition "is on the cusp of a curve," says Bill
Meisel,
editor of Speech Strategy News, an industry newsletter.
Speech recognition, already used in high-end G.P.S. systems and luxury cars
from
Cadillac and Lexus, is now spreading to less expensive systems and cars -
witness
those slapstick
Ford
Sync commercials, featuring vignettes like one showing a young woman who
approaches
her office building and says "door open," expecting it to respond the way
her car
does. It doesn't, and she and her coffee cup smack directly into it.
Sync was developed by Microsoft and Ford, and based on Nuance technology.
And the
speech technology chief at
I.B.M.
Research, David Nahamoo, says the company has an automotive customer
testing speech
recognition to help drivers find songs quickly while driving - no more
pushing buttons.
Then there's SimulScribe, a New York company that is one of several
businesses using
speech recognition to convert voice mail into e-mail. "Voice recognition has
finally
hit the point where someone like ourselves can take it over the hump for
specific
applications," says James Siminoff, SimulScribe's chief executive.
James R. Glass, a principal research scientist at the Computer Science and
Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T., says speech technology "is going to end
up everywhere
speech can be useful." He says machines will keep improving their ability to
recognize
the way humans naturally talk, even if they have strong accents, and that
the technology
will find myriad new uses.
THIS doesn't mean that people will always choose to speak. Genevieve Bell,
director
of user experience at the digital home group of
Intel
, says people are unlikely to want to use speech recognition to handle their
finances,
at least in public spaces. It also may not work well in the living room.
Ms. Bell jokes that if she could, she would yell "cricket!" at the
television anytime
she walked into a room, so her favorite sport would appear on the screen.
Even a digital expert like her 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
soon we will be able to speak our minds to many of our machines, and have
them obey
our commands.
Michael Fitzgerald writes about business, technology and culture. E-mail:
mfitz@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Copyright 2008
The New York Times Company
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