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Intel hosts Beijing speech forum
By Stephanie Miles
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
October 30, 1998, 5 p.m. PT
URL: news.com
Intel will host the first International Speech Forum in Beijing on Monday, an effort to
advance speech recognition technology for Chinese markets.
Intel and other companies back QUOTE SNAPSHOT
October 30, 1998, 1:01 p.m. PT
Intel Corp. INTC
speech recognition applications because they have the potential to be a "killer app" that
needs powerful PCs to work well. Additionally, China is seen as a huge possible market
for speech recognition, because the language's complex character system does not lend
itself easily to touch typing.
"In China, they have difficulty in getting character input into a Western keyboard," said
Rob Sullivan, director of content technologies for Intel. "This is a way to increase the
adoption of PCs in China."
Dragon Systems, Microsoft, Lernout and Hauspie, and IBM, whose ViaVoice 98 is the
first available Chinese speech recognition application, will join Intel in the presentation.
"IBM has been in China over three years, and we're very excited to see our partner
Intel over there as well. It's a big market and we've seen great success already," said a
spokesperson for IBM's speech division. "Keyboards are much more challenging
there--on average, it takes six keystrokes per symbol."
"Historically, Intel has taken a pretty broad look at enabling technologies," Sullivan said.
"The algorithms [for speech recognition] are very computer-intensive--the
grammar-checking and broader sentence checking that is necessary to get accuracy."
The two-day forum will look at accelerating speech recognition, with the goal of
incorporating voice into all desktop applications. More than 500 software developers
and peripheral vendors are expected to attend.
"What we know is the computer is really going to change over the next five years,"
Sullivan said. "There is so much opportunity to integrate technology into applications." |
