Voice Technology is the killer app particularly as the mobile Web becomes more ubiquitous. However there is a downside. Your voice carries. With voice technology, you may even avoid moving. That is certainly possible if you buy an alarm clock that features voice recognition. Here is what such an alarm clock allows you to do:

When the alarm goes off in the morning and you don’t feel like getting up, all you need to do is yell ‘Stop’ which starts a 5-minute snooze timer. The alarm clock recognizes 10 different spoken commands including Set alarm, Set time, Check alarm, What’s the date, Alarm sound, Stop and Temperature.

In this world where ParticipAction is the watchword, such a device seems to be going in the wrong direction. Perhaps you should use an alarm clock that forces you to get up after a short delay. Here is a description of a runaway alarm clock.

After you hit the snooze button, the contraption rolls off the bedside table and zooms away on a set of wheels to some other part of the room, finding a new hiding place every day.

Using a Snooze Button goes entirely against the principles set out by Dave Allen of the Get Things Done company. He would say you should decide when you’re going to do something and then do it. With that philosophy your alarm clock does not need a snooze button of any kind.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• April 9, 2007 -- Will That Be Adaptation Or Alternation?
• November 16, 2006 -- W3C Mobile Web Seminar - 16 November 2006 - Paris, France
• July 20, 2007 -- Google Speak For Mobile Search

Some talented management have been leaving Yahoo! this week. Yesterday it was learnt that Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Network division and leader of many of the company’s core products, is leaving the company. Yesterday also veteran developer Jeremy Zawodny, who helped spearhead important projects like the Yahoo Developer Network, announced on his blog that he would be leaving. Today according to the Washington Post, NYT Bits is reporting the departure of Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and EVP of research and strategic data solutions, which is expected to be officially announced later today.

The most intriguing news for those interested in speech technology was an announcement earlier in the week by Nuance Communications that two other ex-Yahoo’s were joining them. Gary Clayton joins Nuance from his role as vice president, Speech Strategy, at Yahoo! where he oversaw speech implementation for the Yahoo! platform and mobile products, including oneSearch with Voice. Prior to Yahoo!, he spent seven years at Tellme Networks, now part of Microsoft.

Victor Chen is also joining Nuance as senior director, Creative Strategy. Prior to joining Nuance, Mr. Chen served as the director of business management at Yahoo! where he was responsible for developing the company’s speech strategy and introducing oneSearch. Prior to Yahoo!, he was director of strategic initiatives with Tellme, guiding the strategy and design of mobile search applications. Mr. Chen will report to Gary Clayton.

Speech technology is playing an increasingly important role in the development of the mobile web and clearly Nuance is strengthening its position as one of the major players. Microsoft has also been acquiring talent to ensure its stake. Only Google has been somewhat quiet in recent months but by the end of 2008 that undoubtedly will change.

Other Related Posts

• June 5, 2008 -- Talk To Your Bank For Added Security
• May 15, 2008 -- Forget Typos, Watch Your Speakos
• April 2, 2008 -- Keep Your Snoopy Eyes On The Road Ahead

This blog is created by using the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software from Nuance. Just dictate away and typo-free text appears on the screen. It works very effectively and rarely makes a mistake. It really is very impressive. It is one of the reasons why I believe that speech technology is the killer app for the mobile web.

There are countless recent news items to support that belief. Perhaps one of the most dramatic is that banks in the UK will be using voice IDs. The main British banks plan to introduce voice recognition over the next year as a way of deterring card fraudsters, according to speech software specialist Nuance as reported in Personal Computer World.

Ian Turner, general manager for Nuance’s operations in northern Europe, said: “By the end of next year, about 20 million people in the UK will be registered with some kind of system.”

He said voice recognition can be 97 per cent accurate, but it is always used with some other form of identification, such as a password. He added that even good mimics cannot fool the system.

Nuance provides one of the major voice-biometric systems on the market. A recent survey commissioned by Nuance indicated that most people are in favour of multi-factor identification systems, including voice biometrics.

Other Related Posts

• June 13, 2008 -- Talent Management Losses At Yahoo
• November 5, 2007 -- More Speech-Enabled Applications With The Open Handset Alliance
• October 28, 2007 -- Sound Will Drive Mobile Web Growth

Tiffani Mozingo, administrator for the Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) at Sky Lakes Medical Center, in Klamath Falls, Ore. had some dramatic news to report at a recent Medicexchange conference on patient safety. The PACS expedited diagnosis and treatment by getting radiological information into physician’s hands more quickly and with greater accuracy.

Use of this technology enabled Sky Lakes to reduce average TAT (turnaroundtime) for normal reports to the emergency room from almost 78 hours in November 2006, to 5.4 minutes in November 2007. Abnormal reports take less than 15 minutes. The reporting system also yielded a substantial economic benefit. Once Sky Lakes went “live” with the reporting suite, the hospital was able to reassign all 10 of its radiology transcriptionists.

This represents an astonishing improvement, and shows the potential for the immediacy and efficiency of speech technology. It suggests an exponential growth in a wide variety of uses for voice recognition software.

Other Related Posts

• February 15, 2008 -- Voice Recognition Technology To Stop Hospital Cross-Infections
• April 2, 2008 -- Keep Your Snoopy Eyes On The Road Ahead
• March 15, 2008 -- Voice Search On Mobile Phones For A Better User Experience

Move over, small world, it’s a sound world after all. You might be surprised to see (or perhaps to hear) how much speech technology is impacting your own personal world, as compared with say 12 months ago. Clearly, this is not a silent revolution, but you could be forgiven if you had not spotted the changes. Sound is really the killer app. .. and that’s before we hear the impact of the major initiatives that Microsoft and Google have in hand.

Some things are almost imperceptible. Six months ago, you would call your telecom supplier and were frustrated by the experience. You wanted to press zero just to cut through the electronic thicket and get someone who could understand you. If you had an accent, it was even tougher. Call today and in many cases your virtual assistant will do as well as a skilled and well-trained agent could ever have done.

Of course voice to voice is not too difficult. Human beings sometimes have difficulty talking to each other, so we are somewhat forgiving. The much greater challenge is voice to text. Indeed, many readers are sticklers about fine points of grammar and typos. Luckily, most document software has spell checkers. That means that the worst mistakes (typos) can be caught.

This post is being written using Dragon Naturally Speaking software. By now I have trained it reasonably well so it requires few corrections, even with only a modest microphone. This is a growing trend, as you can see by checking on other blog posts. The one that triggered my writing this post read as follows:
If you have cash higher personalities and market leaders for brand association and exposure.
Clearly the author meant to say:
If you have cash, hire personalities and market leaders for brand association and exposure.

Then this morning, a much more visible example showed up on that excellent blog by Andy Nulman. The title read as follows, Changing The World Once Cellphone at a Time. That clearly is an example of a speako.

Some like Eric Bakovic or Adam Albright question whether that is the best term. Would talko or mistalk be better? Well my vote is for speako. The problem is that, since the computer made the speako and it is not mis-spelled, a spell checker does not spot any mistake.

It’s a fascinating subject. There is a discussion at Cre8asite Forums on this if you’re interested. That even branches into the subject of your blog talking back to you. Check out A.L.I.C.E or PandoraBots if you’d like to see where this is all heading.

Other Related Posts

• June 13, 2008 -- Talent Management Losses At Yahoo
• June 5, 2008 -- Talk To Your Bank For Added Security
• April 2, 2008 -- Keep Your Snoopy Eyes On The Road Ahead

Given the safety concerns of using a cell phone while driving, the words of that old Paul Evans song from the 60s (Seven Little Girls Sitting In The Back Seat) may strike a chord or perhaps a ringtone is now more fitting.

Nuance Mobile and TeleNav have just made it a whole lot easier. They’re encouraging you to throw your maps away. They do this by delivering speech-enabled GPS navigation to mobile phones. Here is part of their description of what they offer:

Using the Nuance Mobile Speech Platform on select devices, TeleNav now provides the ability to enter destinations for driving directions and business category searches by voice, so that subscribers no longer need to use a telephone keypad. Users can simply state the destination address, or select from a database of more than 10 million points of interest by stating a category, such as “pharmacy,” or by stating a specific business name, such as “Walgreens.”

Mobile users can conveniently access TeleNav GPS Navigator on a device they already carry with them and receive information in real-time based on their current location. Voice destination entry, which makes navigation services easier to use on mobile phones, has the ability to significantly enhance an already fast-growing market for mobile navigation. Industry analyst firm, In-Stat predicts that the total number of mapping and navigation mobile phone subscribers could exceed 70 million worldwide by 2012.

It certainly seems to be the right time for such voice technology.

Other Related Posts

• March 15, 2008 -- Voice Search On Mobile Phones For A Better User Experience
• February 15, 2008 -- Voice Recognition Technology To Stop Hospital Cross-Infections
• January 19, 2008 -- Fingerless Cell Phones

Since the Mobile Web is likely to increasingly use sound technology, it is perhaps fitting to note that sound technology is even older than we had thought. As the New York Times describes, the oldest known recording will be presented on 28 March at a conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in California.

It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

“This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,” said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio.

Scott’s 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder. That recording until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back. The phonautograph inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.

One can also remark on the pace at which technology advanced in the mid-19th century. What used to take decades then is measured on a time scale of years in the 21st century.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• May 29, 2007 -- Voice On The Go
• August 17, 2006 -- Windows Live Search (now inside Windows Live Messenger)
• November 29, 2007 -- Real Competition Coming To The Canadian Cell Phone Market

Hospitals like our homes are becoming increasingly filled with computers. There are clearly many benefits but the computers bring with them certain risks. As a recent article by Steven Reinberg pointed out, Stomach Flu Is Spread By Contaminated Computer Keyboards. As a U.S. health officials report stated, the highly contagious norovirus, often called the stomach flu, can be passed from one person to another through contact with commonly shared items such as computer keyboards and computer mice.

Steven Davidson and Gregg Malkary even go so far as to call mobile computers Dangerous Devices. They advise that:

Hospitals should explore opportunities to invest in mobile computing devices that can be more easily cleaned and sanitized at point of care with standard commercial cleansers. These devices ideally would be water resistant and hermetically sealed to prevent the entry of microorganisms.

Developing such devices represents some real challenges. Mobile computers in hospitals are in some cases called COWs: that stands for computers on wheels. Perhaps there’s more in the acronym that meets the eye.

Another medical announcement this week may suggest another complementary approach. The Pembroke Regional Hospital Board recently approved the purchase of a new voice recognition dictation system for its diagnostic imaging department. Catherine Junop, vice-president of human resources and organizational services at the hospital, said such systems are becoming the standard in hospital used by radiologists to file their reports. The chief advantage of course is that the System speeds medical information sharing. It also incidentally means that less fingers need to touch keyboards. Perhaps a small side benefit of voice recognition technology in hospitals will be less opportunity for the transfer of infectious diseases.

Other Related Posts

• May 16, 2008 -- Voice Recognition Improves Hospital ER Care
• April 2, 2008 -- Keep Your Snoopy Eyes On The Road Ahead
• March 15, 2008 -- Voice Search On Mobile Phones For A Better User Experience

Engadget Mobile often has some intriguing glimpses of what may be in our future. On the left below is their picture of what is rumored to be the Samsung i900. In their opinion, this is a phone that takes the keypadless, finger-friendly formula that’s oh-so-popular these days and injects some Windows Mobile 6.1 into the equation. They feel it will be a strong competition for a similar phone, the LG KS20.

Using a touchscreen clearly is becoming more popular with the Apple iPhone. However finger-friendly this way of working may be, it’s still not a very precise way of controlling your phone. Perhaps this is only a step towards what we have suggested before, the ultra-simple keyless cell phone. Cell phones are above all devices for handling sound. Why use any other kind of input? The image below on the right shows how simple it might be.

Other Related Posts

• April 2, 2008 -- Keep Your Snoopy Eyes On The Road Ahead
• March 15, 2008 -- Voice Search On Mobile Phones For A Better User Experience
• February 15, 2008 -- Voice Recognition Technology To Stop Hospital Cross-Infections

Sam Abuelsamid tells us that Ford’s new navigation system helps you find low gas prices

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week, Ford will be showing off their latest in-car communications systems including an updated navigation system. The system set to debut this summer on the new Lincoln MKS and includes a new Sirius Travel Link system. Among other things, the Travel Link system has the ability to get fuel price data from stations in the area. It can even be set up to automatically give you directions to the station with lowest gas price.
…
Ford is answering the call with the best technology solutions from companies like Microsoft and SIRIUS, connecting customers with mobile devices, important information they need on the road and bringing the experience to life with the latest in navigation technology and branded audio.

Seyth Miersma reports that the Australians Are Developing High Tech Holden Cop Car. It’s almost like a James Bond car, 2008 model.

The Holden police car contains voice recognition software that let officers keep their hands in place on the wheel, as well as cameras that can beam the action in real-time to communications centers. There’s also an automatic license plate recognition camera proficient enough to scan 5000 to 8000 cars in a 10-hour period.

Which of these functionalities comes to your cell phone first will be influenced by market demand and supportive technology. However full voice control of your mobile device seems a strong contender.

Related: The Keyless Cell phone

Other Related Posts

• October 23, 2007 -- Free 411: GOOG or CALL
• October 20, 2007 -- Microsoft Outdoes Google In Voice Mobile Search
• July 30, 2007 -- Microsoft Still Product-Driven