The Hindu News Update Service
News Update Service Thursday, December 13, 2007 : 0945 Hrs Sci. & Tech. Has voice recognition finally come of age? By Victor Keegan in London Guardian News Service: Speech recognition - enabling computers to transcribe the human voice into readable words - has been tomorrow's technology for so long you could be forgiven for thinking it would never come. And there has always been the problem of how useful it would be when it did arrive if it was anything less than perfect. Things are now changing. Speech technology does routine tasks effectively, and can also do anything from choosing which button to press at a call centre to enabling medics to dictate notes while doing an examination. Anything, it seems, is better than doctors reading back from their own handwriting. It is a bold person who would dictate a message to anywhere public, such as a blog, without editing it first. But one area where speech recognition is very useful is dictating notes to yourself to remind you of things to do, or simply recording those random yet pertinent thoughts that occur to you during the day that might otherwise be forgotten. That would certainly change my life for the better.I have been testing two products recently that enable you to ring a number (obtainable from their websites), dictate a short message into a mobile phone and have the result emailed to you later so you don't forget. Spinvox.com, a UK-based company, has been making most of the running, but this week it has been joined by a US start-up, reQall.com, which was almost suspiciously successful in recording the first few stanzas of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy - even down to the choice of "heir" rather than "air" in the phrase "that flesh is heir to". That's smart. Whether it was the result of improved artificial intelligence, links to a search engine or even a human doing the checking I don't know, but it was certainly impressive. Admittedly, I was speaking slowly and distinctly. The faster I spoke, the less effective the software was and sometimes the email did not arrive at all - maybe due to teething problems. There was a similar high degree of accuracy when I dictated the start of an article to Spinvox, though it cut off after two or three sentences, unlike reQall, which goes on a bit longer. Both of them were much less effective in a noisy taxi with lots of background interference, but the gist of the dictation was still there. The point is that if you are dictating notes to be read later by yourself or a colleague who is familiar with your style, a few mistakes won't matter. But if it is going straightout for public display without checking it could be disastrous. Being able to record snippets of information during the day opens up all sorts of interesting prospects. It is a painless way of writing a diary or even recording all the important moments of your life (which can be searched at a later date). reQall comes with an online calendar so you can easily trace back what you said on a particular day. If, when you sign up for one of these services, you choose a dedicated email address (say, Googlemail, which has almost unlimited capacity) then you would not only have a backup, but a custom-built archive of all your thoughts. This would provide some form of insurance against the probability that in 20 years time the company you have chosen for the story of your life will havepassed on to another world. Services such as Spinvox and reQall will also come up against a new generation of sophisticated "This is your life" sites such as the Oxford start-up Miomi.com, which enables you to archive speech, audio and video through a timeline embracing global events stretching back over many years. It hasn't completely got its act together yet, but is brimful with potential. It has been said that pretty soon we will be able to store a record of our lives in something the size of a sugar cube. If nothing else, this will give people who are living longer and longer a chance to spend To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
