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Technology Stocks : General Magic -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (4432)	12/15/1998 11:30:00 PM
From: Mark Oliver	Respond to of 10081

It seems to me that Motorola is a pretty powerful player in GM's field. They may not have a package that competes directly with Portico, yet, but they certainly hold a lot of cards with their cell phone technology, Starfish software, and Motorola's Voice Markup Language, an emerging standard called VoxML. Does anybody know much about VoxML? Regards, Mark Voice browser packages will offer hands-off access to Web sites By Herb Bethoney, PC Week Labs November 9, 1998 9:00 AM ET zdnet.com Voice-enabled browsers offer the potential to deliver Internet information to a much broader audience. By offering speech access to Web pages, voice browsers will provide hands-free access to online information while driving a car, for example. Web pages designed for viewing on a computer screen deliver a wealth of information, but attempts to simply convert a Web page into speech--via a text-to-speech application, for example--are laden with pitfalls. Elements commonly found in electronic commerce Web sites, such as forms, frames, diagrams and image maps, have no direct translation to speech and are not easily navigated via the telephone. A voice browser accessible from a telephone must let users access Web links and fill out form fields. Although IVR (interactive voice response) systems have been around a long time, their menu-driven architecture doesn't lend itself to the nonlinear aspects of surfing the Web. There are generally two approaches to bringing speech access to the Internet. One approach is to extend HTML using style sheets. ACSS (Aural Cascading Style Sheets), part of the World Wide Web Consortium's recommendation for the CSS 2 specification, allows a document to be displayed aurally as well as visually without requiring a separate Web page for each mode. ACSS is a specification for reading Web pages to a user but doesn't provide a way for developers to allow users to input speech. The other approach is to create a specific markup language for rendering speech input as well as output on the Internet. This is the approach Motorola Inc. has taken with its VoxML specification (see story, above). But Motorola isn't the only player in the voice browser game. IBM has been working with visually impaired computer users for many years to design screen readers and provide accessibility to information technology. The result is IBM Home Page Reader, a voice browser designed by Chieko Asakawa, a blind researcher in IBM's Tokyo Research Labs. Home Page Reader, which is suitable for voice input as well as output, was released in Japan in October 1997. IBM Special Needs Systems, in Austin, Texas, is adapting it for North American users and is adding support for HTML 4.0. Lucent Technologies Inc., of Murray Hill, N.J., is developing PhoneBrowser, a speech recognition product for Internet service providers. PhoneBrowser is a programmable platform that allows Web page authors to build IVR systems without using expensive IVR equipment. PhoneBrowser reads Web pages to a caller via text-to-speech conversion. Users control PhoneBrowser's voice browser by speaking over what the browser is "saying," thus allowing a user to go to a specific point on a Web page without having to wade through seemingly endless options. Siemens Corporate Research Inc.'s Liaison voice browser research effort is aimed at providing drivers with access to Web-based information. Liaison is an eyes-free and, for the most part, hands-free voice browser. Siemens, of Princeton, N.J., is attempting to make listening to the Web like listening to the radio, allowing drivers to make more productive use of their commuting time. In an automobile, safety is the first concern, so Liaison uses a simple voice navigation framework that demands minimal interaction. On the academic front, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science has developed a speech system, called Jupiter, that provides conversational access to weather information for 500-plus cities via a standard telephone.