The
Voice Writing Method of Court
Reporting
Voice Recognition in the Consumer
Marketplace
Voice recognition is developed worldwide, 24/7/365, by global
conglomerates and consortia whose revenues have measured in the
trillions
of dollars: IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, AT&T, Ericsson, Philips,
General Motors, Honda, Sony, and many more. Commoditization of
voice/speech recognition in telecommunications infrastructure proceeds
at an astounding pace. One of the best ways to introduce to the
public new technologies is to make them small, easy, convenient, even
fun, and utilitarian. The public's gradual acceptance of voice
recognition, will make the web- and voice-enabled
refrigerators and washing machines seem anticlimactic when they arrive
en masse. Today a judge can talk to his house on the way out the
door, talk to his Acura, Lexus or Lincoln on the way to work, talk to
his Sprint PCS phone to co-workers, talk to his ViaVoice or Dragon
Naturally Speaking-enabled PC at work, and repeat the process on the
way
back home.
Some of the myriad integrations of voice into the global communications
infrastructure, to date:
- The last two versions of Microsoft Office are fully voice
recognition-enabled, as is Visual Studio .NET.
- Sony's pet robodog, "Aibo."
- Tellme and Shoptalk are helping Jiffy Lube send automated phone
alerts to customers when it's time for an oil change.
- VeriSign, "which maintains the registry for the ".com," ".net"
and
".org" domains, announced a pilot program for a system called "Global
Voice Registry."
- "Voice is the ultimate thin client," says Oracle, who has
partnered with a number of companies, including Nuance, SpeechWorks,
General Magic, Intel, Motorola, Verascape, Vail Systems and VoiceGenie.
- Charles Schwab customers, who previously could say only a company
name
or
symbol to get a quote over the phone, can now make trades or transfer
funds in the
same way.
- Home Shopping Network has 700,000 customers who use their voice
as an ID.
- AT&T, Lucent Technologies and Motorola have founded the
VoiceXML
Forum to establish and promote the voice extensible markup language
(VoiceXML), which will be a common standard for making internet content
and information accessible via voice and phone.
- AT&T eliminated 200, or nearly half, of its toll-free
directory
assistance operators after switching all of its weekend and evening
services and part of its weekday services to speech automation. The new
system now handles half the center's 1.5 million monthly calls and has
cut routing times so dramatically that service complaints have dropped
by 80 percent.
- By 2005, according to the Kelsey Group, the annual market for the
panoply of voice applications and equipment could be $75 billion, up
from a few hundred million in 2003.