If you consider all the fields of human activities where speech recognition technology might be used, the hospital environment would seem to offer the most beneficial uses.  Just think of some of the benefits:

• Reducing cross-infection by using keyboards
• Hands-free operation allowing the physician to minister to the patient
• Reduction in errors in record keeping for patients
• Improved quality of patient care
• Reduced cost

Not surprisingly, it does not seem inappropriate to say that Every hospital will have speech recognition infrastructure.

A big influence on that will be Nuance  It is among the world’s most influential software companies with 4.5 billion users – half the world’s population. It specialises in data input and information capture by text or speech – improving communication between man and machine. Following its recent acquisitions Nuance have now embarked on their mission across the European healthcare systems.

The Nuance vision of how speech recognition will be used in five years’ time is that it will change the way health services are delivered in a major way:

In five or ten years, all hospitals will use electronic patient record systems. These will become more structured so we can get statistical information from them easily. At the moment, we can’t, because the data is sitting on paper and is virtually unusable.

Speech recognition will continue to be a major help to doctors filling in these structured reports.  We are already researching ‘talk forms’ – doctors talk in free narrative and the form fills in automatically.  We also have to move towards using decision support systems to give immediate feedback to doctors when they make a mistake – at the point of dictation.  Whether that happens over an iPod, a PDA or a mobile phone, it won’t matter – we will be there because in the future, every hospital will have speech recognition infrastructure.

Just check out the technology being used the next time you enter a hospital environment.  You may be surprised what you hear.

Post from: StayGoLinks

Hospitals Lead In Speech Recognition Infrastructures

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Manas Ganguly highlighted the way in which Google Audio Indexing (short form GAUDI) is encouraging media democratization. That process was started by YouTube but Google video search can now allow a user to search for a particular reference in a speech.

Google Audio Indexing (Gaudi) is a new technology that allows users to better search and watch videos from various YouTube channels. It uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video where these words are spoken. Google Audio Indexing thus makes it easier for people to find and consume spoken content from videos on the Web.

The official announcement suggested we would be seeing continuing innovation. For more detailed information on GAUDI, check out the FAQ for this technology.

Google for some time has had Google Elections Video Search gadget which is wholly US centric information. It was very instrumental in pulling together information on the views, actions and platforms of the two presidential candidates. Google Audio and the Google Elections Video Search gadget use the exact same underlying technology.

Google Audio Indexing uses speech technology to transform spoken words into text and leverages the Google indexing technology to return the best results to the user. The returned videos are ranked based — among other things — on the spoken content, the metadata, the freshness. The gadget periodically crawls the YouTube political channels for new content. As soon as a new video is uploaded to YouTube, it is processed by the system and made available in the GAUDI index for people to search.

Google Audio Indexing searches only those videos uploaded on the YouTube political channels at the present time. That is a very limited scope currently, but it will surely not be long before Google extends the use over the whole YouTube Gamut.

Post from: StayGoLinks

Dipping into videos with Google’s GAUDI

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The El Camino Hospital in Silicon Valley has opened a new facility making it possibly the most wired hospital you can find.

The $480 million, state-of-the-art facility takes full advantage of new technologies, ranging from a wall-to-wall wireless network, to patient beds with built-in translators for 22 languages, to robots that move around the hospital carrying medical supplies and patient meals. Robotic devices help doctors perform surgeries and electronic lifts help get patients into beds safely.

There is also a Genomics Center as part of the facility. The state-of-the-art, seismically sound acute care center has health care business intelligence capabilities based on the Amalga technology from Microsoft. By aggregating ambulatory and inpatient data in a common data store, the Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS) delivers a cross-care continuum view of the patient without requiring clinicians to learn multiple systems or requiring IT to maintain multiple systems.

Now that is one smart hospital.

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Smart Hospitals Speak Your Language

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Voice technology is undoubtedly the preferred input method as the mobile web evolves.  The gaming industry will certainly be the leading edge in this evolution.  Now Tom Clancy’s Endwar from Ubisoft Shanghai demonstrates a robust example of what is possible.

The developer, Ubisoft Shanghai, has cheated a little though. Rather than use the software to recognize actual words, it is used to recognize the sounds that make up those words – the system used looks out for particular sounds that go to make up a word. This cunningly gets around the need for a large amount of training generally required with standard speech recognition software, and also gets around the problem of accents: the main sounds of a word are essentially the same, regardless of your accent. The problem has been simplified even further by only recognizing a handful of words – about eighty or ninety, according to Ubisoft.

Overall the review is basically positive, although there are some reservations:

Tom Clancy’s Endwar has an innovative control method which works surprisingly well; and it has a storyline that is both interesting and pertinent to today’s events. The voice control works excellently, but it works so well because it has a limited range of understanding, and this in turn limits other parts of the game.

For more information about the game there is a paperback, Tom Clancy’s EndWar. Although this may be a work in progress for voice technology, it would seem to be a most promising start, particularly in getting over those accents.

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Tom Clancy’s Endwar Voice Commands

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A story this weekend makes me wonder whether Botch your Buzz (ByB) is a new way of feeding the social media frenzy.  Botch of course is a blunder, an embarrassing mistake.  However we humans more often talk about others’ weaknesses rather than their strengths.  Perhaps ByB could join other fundamental organizational processes that rely on basic human nature such as BbB (Bullshit Baffles Brains).

The genesis of this story is an item from Michael Arrington giving an Update On Google iPhone Voice Recognition App: Look For It On Monday.  As he recounts:

Google’s voice recognition search application for the iPhone, originally set for launch on Friday, will likely go live sometime Monday, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the situation.

Google was under the impression that the application would be live on the App Store on Friday (obviously, since they pushed all significant press attention to it). Sometime Friday they found out Apple wouldn’t be pushing it, despite the fact that Google submitted it for review earlier in the week and got a thumbs up for Friday.

Who knows why Apple delayed the application, or why they tend to treat every application developer equally poorly.  But in this case Apple really screwed up in our opinion.  ..  Google could have launched for the Android first and pushed sales of phones on their platform. They didn’t, and Apple should have embraced them for that.  Next time I expect Google won’t be so trusting. And I don’t blame them.

That is probably what really happened.  Nevertheless it may well be that more people talk about this online than if all had gone smoothly on Friday.  If all had gone smoothly, then all we could talk about is the technology.  This way that technology talk is now leveraged with the scandal of an organizational blunder.  It perhaps is a good example of what I like to call Crikey! Surprise Marketing.

Post from: StayGoLinks

Botch Your Buzz (ByB)

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There’s a happy vibe that comes from hearing RightNow when someone offers to help. Our eye was therefore drawn to the following headline, “VLM Airlines deploys RightNow to enhance customer self-service“.  SMM has gone with the same theme in the Marketing Right Now series giving practical steps on doing Internet Marketing effectively.

The RightNow deployment will help VLM Airlines deliver passengers an improved customer experience as they interact with the company online.

The majority of VLM passengers fly for business purposes and the company prides itself on being able to quickly and efficiently serve the needs of passengers via user friendly online booking, e-ticketing, internet check-in and short check-in times.  With RightNow, VLM customers will now have round-the-clock access to a ‘Simply Questions’ section on the airline’s website www.flyvlm.com, where they can find answers to general travel questions.

Certainly customers appreciate having instant replies when they’re looking for service.  Another approach is Interactive Chat which can improve both Sales and Customer Service.  For example, Memorysuppliers.com offers one-to-one, 24-hour-a-day chat.

With four people dedicated to chat and email responses, Memorysuppliers.com is one of thousands of ecommerce companies adding chat to its marketing and customer service mix.

What they and many others are finding is that customers are happier and sales growth covers the investment many times over.  That makes it win/win.

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RightNow Customer Service

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There is an awful lot of political chatter in both Canada and the US at the moment. An interesting tool being developed in the Google labs allows you to stay on top of all this chatter. It’s called the Google Audio Indexing (GAudi) technology. Arnaud Sahuguet describes it in a post entitled Straight from the horse’s mouth.

You can now search for and watch political videos right from the Google News US election page.

Just enter the topic you’re interested in, or the sequence of words you want to find, and we’ll search candidates’ YouTube channels to return a set of relevant videos. You can filter the results by channel (all candidates, McCain’s campaign, Obama’s campaign or the presidential debates). When we return a result, we use yellow markers to indicate the exact moments the words you’re looking for are uttered. Just hover over the marker to read the transcript of a short audio snippet or click on it to jump to the right moment inside the video.

It is an interesting example of the power of speech technology. We can expect to hear more and more such applications in the very near future.

Post from: StayGoLinks

What did they really say?

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Dave Mock of the Motley Fool suggests that Nuance Bucks the Trend.

Nuance Communications (Nasdaq: NUAN) doesn’t top any lists as a recession-resistant stock, but the company is at least showing some solid strength in a tough economic climate.
…
The company says its flagship Dragon Naturally Speaking software has gotten an enthusiastic welcome since its release. And the mobile sector continues to be strong, as device makers such as Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Motorola (NYSE: MOT), and Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM) make speech-based interaction a standard feature in new devices.

What had got everyone’s interest was the news that Nuance Buys Philips’ Speech Recognition Unit For $96 Million.

The Philips unit, officially called Philips Speech Recognition Systems (PSRS), is based in Vienna, Austria, and provides a wide variety of speech-recognition solutions in 25 languages to meet medical documentation requirements for hospitals, physician practices, and other health care organizations.

Nuance noted that speech recognition is becoming ubiquitous in European health care markets. Adding that it plans to integrate PSRS’s solutions with many of its existing speech-recognition products, including its Dragon Medical SDK, Nuance said that it plans to fully support all PSRS customers and partners in the future.

Such good results may well be a confirmation of the strength of speech technology, given the growth in the mobile web. Undoubtedly the activities of Google with Android can only help to stir up interest.

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Nuance Grows Even Stronger As It Rides The Sound Wave

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There are some major moves in the voice recognition software marketplace. IBM Research has announced that it is unleashing powerful speech software that will make speech technologies part of everyday life.

As part of an effort to bring IBM Research’s vaunted intellectual capital directly into the marketplace, the opening of IBM Research’s speech assets will make it easier for IBM customers and partners to gain a competitive advantage in new markets by integrating the industry’s most advanced speech recognition software.

Then Dragon NaturallySpeaking has now launched version 10 with appreciable improvements in speed and accuracy. As one reviewer put it,

Never mind the PC’s keyboard, here’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking
Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, the new voice recognition program from Nuance Communications Inc., is fast enough and accurate enough to render my keyboard obsolete. According to Nuance, NaturallySpeaking 10 is about 20 percent more accurate than its predecessor. Better still, it’s about 50 percent faster, so there’s very little delay between the sound of my voice and the appearance of text.

All the other biggies on the Internet scene, in particular Google and Microsoft, are all beavering away as well. The reason for this is that the Internet will be moving in large part to cell phones as the mobile web becomes the online space of choice.

If there is a paradox it is that this is not a hot item of discussion among consumers. You can check that out by using the new Google tool, Insights. A search for voice recognition software shows the following trend:

Voice Recognition Software Trend

In interpreting such a picture, there is a major caution to be made. Google normalizes these results against all the searches that are done. Here is how Google explains the normalization process.

Key Points Of Normalization:

*New York doesn’t appear on the list for the term ‘haircut.’ Does this mean that people in New York don’t search for this term at all?

Remember, Google Insights for Search shows the likelihood of users in a particular area to search for a term on Google on a relative basis. So, just because New York isn’t on the top regions list for haircut doesn’t necessarily mean that people there don’t search for that term at all. Consider the following scenarios. It could be that people in New York:

• don’t use Google to find a barber or hair salon
• use a different term for haircut-related searches
• search for so many other topics unrelated to haircuts, that searches for haircut comprise a small portion of the search volume from New York as compared to other regions

Since Googling for answers is now the preferred research method, even keywords that are growing modestly in popularity will show a downward trend. Unless Google reveals the total number of keyword searches that are done, one cannot determine whether consumers are more or less interested in voice recognition software. What is quite certain is that, although they may not presently show massive interest versus YouTube or Facebook, within 12 months that picture will be changing.

Related: Insights Into Google Search

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The Voice Recognition Software Paradox

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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.

Post from: StayGoLinks

Voice Technology Makes Life Too Easy

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