Interesting article, but where's GMGC??? It's just not a major player when you read article after article on this subject and no mention of GMGC. They mention Wildfire.
But, what you read here is interesting.
Bringing home a trend that has begun to sweep Europe and Asia, in recent months companies such as Bell Atlantic Mobile and Sprint PCS have locally made the leap from selling basic phone service to offering units that can connect to the Internet to find stock quotes and news headlines and get and send e-mail.
This means they are introducing WAP phones.
With a potentially huge market at stake, the race to develop speech-recognition systems is heating up, with Greater Boston serving as a base for much of the research and development.
The companies now working on the technology include Belgian speech technology giant Lernout & Hauspie, which has 400 employees at its Burlington North American headquarters; SpeechWorks International Inc. of Boston; Dragon Systems of Newton; Parlance Corp. of Medford; InTouch of Cambridge; Shoutmail.com of Chestnut Hill; and Wildfire Communications Inc. of Lexington. Their progress is being driven to a considerable extent by research at three speech-recognition labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Oh yes, the first mover advantage is well and truly gone. There is a lot of competition and from companies better aligned than GMGC. Also, these companies have more money to make acquisitions to compete.
A growing political backlash against unsafe driving caused by people with one hand or two eyes on their cell phone could also be a potent force driving improved speech-recognition technology. Nationally, 15 states and some 300 cities and towns have recently considered laws or ordinances banning cell phone use while driving, according to a recent Associated Press survey. Given how much more distracting it can be to try to read or search for information while driving, high-speed wireless Web surfing could become especially controversial.
Yup, but when something is important I want to stop the car and see it. What happens when you are looking for a place and you need a map? First you have to choose a place and then see the driections. Maybe you take turn-by-turn instructions to get there, but I want to check it all out visually first.
Why choose a limited service like Portico when you get a VUI interface with GUI from other vendors?
While market prognasticators predict that consumers will snap up Net-enabled phones, it is not clear that they want to make as much use of them as wireless companies hope. The Yankee Group polled Americans last year asking them how much they want wireless-phone access to various types of information, on a 1 to 4 scale.
The highest average rating was for weather, but only a lukewarm 2. News and stock quotes all got barely a 1.5, with only 12 percent of people saying it was somewhat or very important to them to be able to get this information from the wireless phone, according to Yankee analyst Adam Zowal.
And the average customer was not willing to spend more than 83 cents per month per service, according to Yankee Group's survey, far below the typical $10 a month carriers charge with premium digital calling plans.
'There is definitely missionary work' that has to be done, Kendra Vandermuelen, AT&T's senior vice president of product development and strategy, told the Dallas Morning News recently. 'The market does not fully appreciate what can be done here.'
Take away the hassle users now have to get much of that information, however, and the service becomes a much easier sell.
Here is again the basic problem. The service GMGC wants to sell is not offering enough value to get people to pay up. Sure, they can get users if they give it away like MyTalk.com and sure this will give them experience, but they've got to make some money sometime.
Still, for all their experience, they can't get any mention in the papers? Are these reporters so much dumber than we are? Sure, half the articles are paid PR pieces, but at some point you'd think they'd mention GMGC, wouldn't you?
Oliver Valente, vice president of technology and advanced systems development with Sprint PCS, said his company has seriously evaluated several speech-based systems over the last two years. However, Valente added: 'We do feel that it's not crucial to have speech technology to work with the wireless Web, but it would be an enhancement. I think we are getting very close to something that the end user would find of value.
'If you haven't used the service, you might think it sounds like you have to press a lot of keys to move around, but it's something that users get used to. Once you try it and get used to it, it's really not all that bad,' Valente said, adding that many frequent requests - like access to a stock portfolio - can be bookmarked in the phone for rapid access.
Yeah, they looked at GMGC and didn't like it. People used it and said see us next year when the product is ready for market. It's not compelling enough, or perhaps good enough to get me to pay extra on my bill.
Conversely, the same advances have allowed companies like SpeechWorks and Lernout & Hauspie to offer systems that read back information with ever-more-human inflection, cadence, and pausing.
It's too painful to use a poor TTS. You expect people to walk through an airport listening to complex news reports, or whatever using a voice that requires concentration to understand. Fix the TTS and you'll get more people using these systems.
But even while the costs of both cellular airtime and chip processing power continue to plunge, a big question is how much speech technology to put on the phone, and how much to put on the network.
Some users might prefer to rapidly download a lot of information to the phone and have a speech module there turn it into spoken language rather than burn up airtime hearing it read from a computer linked to the phone network.
Yes, how hard will iit be to put TTS on the user device. Conversa is doing both TTS and ASR on a Samsung phone now. It's not as good as GMGC on the ASR front, but the TTS is pretty similar. How far off is the TTS?
Car computers currently run a special Pentium processor designed for cars. They top out at 166 mhtz, but they'll get faster and cheaper. ARM is making some really great low voltage processors that will handle very complicated tasks. Sandisk and other see cell phones driving great growth in compact flash memory. GM has heads up displays that provide night vision. How long before they give heads up with data. Pilots use it.
My feeling is GMGC had first mover status, but when their product was perfectly tuned to handle the times, the customer didn't want the service. Now, they are faced with lesser technical offering with a one dimentional VUI.
Great case for partnership, or acquisition. Not too great for staying the course.
Shoutmail.com of Chestnut Hill, for example, has pioneered a new system that allows people to get electronic mail without even having to own a computer. People who sign up for a Shoutmail e-mail account dial in to hear a robotic female voice read them their mail, through a system developed by Lernout & Hauspie, and can respond by dictating 'wave files' in their own voice that recipients play back on their computer.
The company, which already has 350,000 subscribers nationally, today plans to launch a new text-to-speech product. It will offer people a customized package from 800 categories of of news and information - including sports scores, horoscopes, and news headlines - delivered over their phone.
Initially, subscribers will hear announcers who have read spots at a Shoutmail studio. However, Shoutmail president Jacob Guedalia said the company is also now offering a free system for Web page owners to convert their site content into a form that can be read aloud by the Shoutmail robot lady when users ask for it by punching a number on the keypad.
Shoutmail plans soon to add L&H technology to its network to make access to that information available by response to spoken commands - 'What is Delta flight 404 departure time?' or 'Stock quote for Gillette symbol G' - as an alternative to entering touch-tone commands from the keypad.
'Everyone understands that voice needs to be part of the story,' Guedalia said. 'Letting your phone reply to you with a voice, rather than having to look at tiny text on a little screen while you're trying to drive, just makes a hell of a lot more sense.'
Sound familiar?
Regards,
Mark
It's raining here in California also. We'll be back in Byron Bay around the first. Hope to see you gloating as the price rose and I missed it. |
