From: rbfar@ebuilt.com
Date: Sat Jan 06 2001 - 16:39:25 PST
I think the main reasons for voice to be popular are that the telephone is
the most popular electronic device and that next gen entertainment devices
are making a push for voice user interface control (and then communication)
Also, that we spent the 90's mostly on building the infrastructure: the
next big wave will focus, I believe, on the user interface. Things will be
dormant for a couple of years while the economy sucks gas. BUT, during
these couple of years, the next gen. winners will be creating products that
will pump up technology. ONE of them being voice user interfaces.
The technology has improved drastically. I've played with SpeechWorks and
AlphaWorks (IBM). I've done real work on Nuance. Nuance has everyone beat
in core technolgoy, but SpeechWorks is hot on their trail.
Regardless, when I looked into this stuff several years ago, technology was
really not usable. I've been coding an application using Nuance, and, it is
commercial quality.
This technology is ready to become main stream.
R
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen D. Williams" <sdw@lig.net>
To: <FoRK@xent.com>; <geeks@lig.net>
Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2001 2:05 AM
Subject: AOLbyPhone is officially cool...
> $4.95, 800 number, speech recognition (but not yet for composing), fairly
good
> text to speech with reasonable inflection.
>
> Allows you to read your email (but not intelligent choices of which
email),
> get weather, sports, headlines, shopping, and interestingly 'phone call'.
>
> Weather was interesting because it somehow knew I was in Las Vegas when I
> called with my Virginia mobile phone.
>
> 'Phone Call' allows you to make a 2 min call to anywhere, free, while in
the
> middle of a browsing session. It offers to call the sender of email.
(Didn't
> explore that yet.)
>
> Poor performance with interruption even though it invites you to do so,
but I
> was mostly using speakerphone to demo it.
>
> To cover the long distance (i.e. 800 charges) including payphone surcharge
> ($0.30 as per FCC; they invite you to use it from payphones), and the
outgoing
> phone calls (ok, LD is nominally $0.06/min now), along with the capital
costs
> that will be needed to handle this for a large number of users, this is
> reasonably impressive. I think it's cool for the price/performance and
that
> AOL thinks it's now scalable enough to start selling with popups. Anyone
know
> who's technology they're using?
>
> There seem to be many voice competitors suddenly.
>
> sdw
> --
> sdw@lig.net sdw@insta.com
swilliams@Jabber.com
> Stephen D. Williams Insta, Inc./Jabber.Com, Inc./CCI
http://sdw.st
> 43392 Wayside Cir,Ashburn,VA 20147-4622 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax
Dec2000
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