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To: GC who wrote (428)	3/11/1999 3:09:00 PM
From: GC	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 767

interesting article, old but useful,see the race is on... Saturday, October 17, 1998 ITfocus: Voice Recognition Its master's voice: The PC lends an ear More FP Technology stories By GEOF WHEELWRIGHT For The Financial Post After more than 15 years on the fringes of the computer industry, voice-recognition software is finally making it to the personal computer. There are now a variety of applications that will turn the spoken word into the printed word. One of these is Lernout & Hauspie's Voice Xpress Professional, which claims to "voice-enable the desktop." While this claim might otherwise be dismissed as so much marketing hype, the credibility of Belgium-based Lernout & Hauspie in the field of speech-recognition is great; several years ago, its leadership in the field was acknowledged in the form of a significant investment from Microsoft Corp., which is doing extensive research in this area. Voice Xpress Professional's main bonus is what it calls "Natural Language Technology" (NLT), which the company describes as a "suite of sophisticated processes" that "permit speech-enabled products to interpret natural speech intelligently." This is important, because the spoken word often makes little sense unless you have a strong sense of the language rules that reveal the context in which a word, phrase or sentence is spoken. The classic case of this is the phrase "recognize speech," which can end up mangled by some speech-recognition products into a phrase such as "wreck a nice beach." The other big issue when speech recognition is used in word-processing software comes when you want to issue a command. When the computer hears a phrase, such as "save," it has to know whether you are intending to have it save your file or whether it is supposed to type out the word "save" on-screen. The same is true of words spoken to navigate around a document. When you say "cursor up," you want to the on-screen cursor to move up the page, not type the words "cursor up." To ensure that this happens, a specialized voice command must be given to invoke a command mode to switch to accepting spoken commands. Finally, voice-recognition software must be able to be used from within office productivity applications. Voice Xpress Professional, for example, sells for less than $300 and supports the Microsoft Office applications, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, the PowerPoint 97 presentation graphics program and Outlook 98 messaging and collaboration software. A typical use of this natural language capacity within a Microsoft Office application, for example, would be using Voice Xpress Professional to issue English language-style commands, such as "insert a four-by-five table," "average this row," or "start the slide show." Dragon Systems Inc. has developed a number of new products in its "Naturally Speaking" range of titles. The most intriguing of these is "Naturally Speaking Mobile," which the company claims is the first mobile speech-recognition system designed specifically for the job. The product includes a version of Dragon's Naturally Speaking speech-recognition software, the company's new "Dragon Naturally Mobile" pocket-sized recorder, and "Naturally Mobile" software for recorded speech. The company says this combination will enable users to create, edit and format documents by speaking into a hand-held device. To write a document, record a thought, or fill out a report, users just have to speak into the Dragon Naturally Mobile pocket recorder using the built-in microphone. When the recordings are completed, they can be downloaded to a PC using a high-speed serial link and the software will then transcribe the text and can execute commands for formatting and editing the text. Dragon Systems suggests that recorded speech can be transcribed faster than a person took to record it. The system sells for US$299. Probably the best-known voice-recognition system in the PC market is IBM's "ViaVoice 98." This also uses a version of "natural language" commands to let users create, edit and format documents in Microsoft Word 97 and Lotus WordPro. The premier version of ViaVoice 98 is the Executive Edition, which promises direct dictation into most popular Windows applications, voice control of the desktop and its applications, and includes two ViaVoice "topics" (sets of recognizable words) known as "ViaVoice Computer" and "ViaVoice Business & Finance" to supplement the base vocabulary.It sells for US$149. Money News Money Stocks Biz Tickers Mutual Funds Money Rates Canoe Compass German finance minister steps down Manitoba Hydro buys Centra Gas Alcatel plans to cut 12,000 jobs, mostly in U.S. Telecom seeks merger to thwart Olivetti bid CANOE home \| We welcome your feedback. Copyright © 1999, Canoe Limited Partnership. All rights reserved. Please click here for full copyright terms and restrictions.

To: GC who wrote (428)	3/11/1999 3:21:00 PM
From: GC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 767

different sites one can visit to do more DD Saturday, October 17, 1998 Site Seeing Web wisdom on recognizing spoken words More FP Technology stories By GEOF WHEELWRIGHT For The Financial Post Star Trek has a lot to answer for. The 1960s hit television show popularized the idea of being able to talk to computers -- and have them answer back. Yet it has only been in the past few years that speech technology has been powerful enough to be used on the average desktop personal computer in any meaningful way. And there is still lots more work to be done before it achieves the level of widespread use enjoyed by computer keyboards. This has made it one of the most widely researched technologies in the computer industry and the academic world. To get a good sense of just where that research is leading, you may want to visit one of the many World Wide Web sites devoted to this subject: swww.tiac.net/users/rwilcox/speech.html -- This site, run by speech recognition enthusiast Russ Wilcox, is not the most technologically taxing side your browser will ever visit, but it is a great directory for anyone who wants to find out more about the business of speech recognition. There are links to many software companies, research organizations, university sites, trade show calendars and online demonstrations. If you want to get a sense of the state of speech technology, this is an excellent place to start. shttp://sls-www.lcs.mit.edu/ec-nsf/mit-sls.html -- Your next stop might be at Boston's Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The spoken language systems group (SLS) at MIT's computer science lab is devoted to the research and development of what it calls "interactive conversational systems". Researchers suggest a "speech interface", in a user's own language, is ideal because "it is the most natural, flexible, efficient, and economical form of human communication." The MIT group's research activities fall into three categories. In the first, basic research is aimed at measuring and modeling various aspects of the speech communication chain, ranging from the development of computational models of how humans hear to the modeling of linguistic regularities in spontaneous speech. The group's second area of research will use these results to develop algorithms for speech recognition and language understanding. The third research category will integrate the component technologies into prototype spoken language systems with varying capabilities. Several applications are already under development including something the group calls its "Voyager" system, designed to help future drivers explore and navigate in an unknown urban setting, and the "Pegasus" system allowing travelers to make airline reservations. swww.bell-labs.com/project/tts/ -- Given Alexander Graham Bell's interest in early speech technology, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Bell Laboratories (part of Lucent Technologies) has developed what it calls the Bell Labs Text-to-Speech system (TTS), which is featured at this site. Bell Labs suggests its TTS system has various applications, including reading electronic mail messages, generating spoken prompts in voice response systems, and as an interface to an order-verification system for salespeople in the field. In its current form, TTS is implemented entirely in software and only standard audio capability is required. It also contains several components -- each of which handles a different task. For example, the text analysis capabilities of the system detect the ends of sentences, perform some rudimentary syntactic analysis, expand digit sequences into words, and translate and expand abbreviations into normally spelled words that can then be analysed by the dictionary-based pronunciation module. Visit this site to hear more details about the project. swww.research.microsoft.com/research/srg/ -- Microsoft spends more than US$2 billion of research and development money every year in a number of key areas. Speech technology is one of them -- and one to which the software giant is heavily committed. At this site, you'll learn about the work of Microsoft's speech technology group. Current projects include one code-named Whisper (Speech Recognition) and another that goes by the name of Whistler (Speech Synthesis). The group is also working on text-to-speech (where the computer speaks words that you type into it), spoken language understanding and the development of a "multimodal conversational user interface." CANOE home \| We welcome your feedback. Copyright © 1999, Canoe Limited Partnership. All rights reserved. Please click here for full copyright terms and restrictions.