Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Fred Fahmy who wrote (60739)	7/18/1998 1:57:00 PM
From: Dale J.	Respond to of 186894

All - Article in the WSJ about paid stock promoter on SI (Not Intel of course). That is the problem with OTC stocks. They can be subject to manipulation. interactive.wsj.com

To: Fred Fahmy who wrote (60739)	7/18/1998 2:13:00 PM
From: Barry Grossman	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 186894

Question - What do you do with all that new processing power that is now and will become available? Read on dear skeptics. Italics are mine. zdnet.com Looking Forward Emerging technology helps e-commerce find its voice By Mark L. Van Name & Bill Catchings July 13, 1998 Computers have never handled speech very well. Recognizing and understanding the spoken word have long been obvious jobs for computers, and a lot of people have invested a lot of time and money in these technologies. Despite these efforts, however, the percentage of computers running speech-driven programs today remains negligible. Over the next few years, that's going to change; three forces will combine to make speech a key part of electronic commerce. The implications for e-commerce are huge. The first force is the GREATER AVAILABILITY OF PROCESSING POWER.(read: Intel's product line) For years, adding speech recognition to a program meant either accepting low quality or dedicating a great deal of expensive computing power to the problem. The processing power available in today's PCs, however, is enough to run some pretty solid speech-recognition applications. We've looked, for example, at such products as Dragon Systems' NaturallySpeaking and Lernout & Hauspie's Voice Xpress Plus (see PC Week Labs' review); both can run on commonly available PCs as front ends to Word. That capability is important, because it means the processor does not have to devote all its power to running the speech recognition software. The PC can use the remaining processing power both to run the applications the speech recognition software is front-ending and, just as importantly, to understand the words the system has just recognized. The improvement in both speech recognition and speech understanding technology is the second force that will bring speech to e-commerce. In a recent chat with Bob Kutnick, CEO of Lernout & Hauspie, we learned about the speech understanding work his firm is doing; the results could be exciting. Context is the key to this work. To understand speech, a program must know what words mean in different contexts. A program does not, however, have to know all of a word's possible meanings in all possible contexts. One of Kutnick's examples was the rich context of such specialized applications as Photoshop. Understanding "color the square Pantone 235" is a complex job. Handling "now try Pantone 236" adds more complexity, because this command involves the context of the previous one. Yet these are exactly the kinds of sentences a Photoshop user might want to speak, and exactly the kinds Kutnick hopes Lernout & Hauspie's products will be able to handle. Such capabilities would be very useful for online businesses. Imagine a site that could understand such queries as "Anything else by this author?" or "Do you have it in brown?" The more a site could let customers speak naturally, the more it would entice them to do further business there. Those capabilities might not matter much to many of us because we're accustomed to typing our requests in online forms. The Web, however, is still not reaching a large percentage of the population. The economic need to reach that group is the final force that will bring speech to e-commerce. Many people who find a point-click-and-type interface unnatural or a barrier would be far more comfortable with a speech-driven interface. These interfaces will be possible within the next few years. Add voice synthesis, and you can easily imagine sites that provide support and ordering systems that let customers feel as if they're interacting with human operators -- even though most of the time they're working with software. (When the systems get stuck, they can always escalate the interaction to their human "supervisors.") Keep an eye on these technologies -- and plan some pilot projects over the next couple of years -- because they're going to change the face of e-commerce. --------------------- Still skeptical about the need for more processing power? Doubters will be WRONG!. Barry