Talking To Your Devices About To Become Pervasive

 Voice Recognition

Voice-controlled interfaces are showing up in mobile phones, TVs, and automobiles. Nuance Communications believes it can give just about everything a voice. The company, which traces its roots back to Ray Kurzweil's Kurzweil Computer Products, recently discussed their activities with MIT's Technology Review.

I n the near future, people will be interacting with their devices in many ways, and if Nuance Communications is correct, one of the main ways we will use our technology will be through talking to it. 

Nuance Communications a company based in Burlington, Massachusetts, currently leads the market for speech recognition with its Dragon software and other products. The company — which was once part of Ray Kurzweil's Kurzweil Computer Products venture — now has over 6000 employees, and is potentially on the cusp of explosive growth.

Nuance has keenly applied its expertise in voice recognition to the emerging market for speech interfaces in the past few years. The company supplies voice recognition technology to many other companies and is widely believed to provide the speech feature of Apple's Siri interface.

Things are already changing quickly. Apple's Siri is already being used by millions of customers, and Apple will, it would seem, soon be releasing a Siri-controlled television. With people now talking to their mobile smart phones, asking them to send e-mail and text messages, search for directions, or find information on the Web, where else might the techology be used?

"We're at a transition point where voice and natural-language understanding are suddenly at the forefront," says Vlad Sejnoha, chief technology officer of Nuance Communications, "I think speech recognition is really going to upend the current [computer] interface."

With the success of voice recognition software on mobile phones, Nuance hope to put its speech interfaces in many more places, most notably the television and the automobile. Both are popular and ripe for innovation.

Jim Glass, a senior research scientist at MIT who has been working on speech interfaces since the 1980s, says today's smart phones pack as much processing power as the laboratory machines he worked with in the '90s. Smart phones also have high-bandwidth data connections to the cloud, where servers can do the heavy lifting involved with both voice recognition and understanding spoken queries. "The combination of more data and more computing power means you can do things today that you just couldn't do before," says Glass. "You can use more sophisticated statistical models."

At Nuance's research labs, Sejnoha demonstrated for MIT's Technology Review, software called Dragon TV running on a television in a mocked-up living room. When a colleague said, "Dragon TV, find movies starring Meryl Streep," the interface instantly scanned through channel listings to select several appropriate movies. A version of this technology is already in some televisions sold by Samsung.

The Sync entertainment system in Ford cars already uses Nuance's technology to let drivers pull up directions, weather information, and songs. About four million Ford cars on the road have Sync with voice recognition. Last week, Nuance introduced software called Dragon Drive that will let other car manufacturers add voice-control features to vehicles.

Sejnoha believes that within a few years, mobile voice interfaces will be much more pervasive and powerful. "I should just be able to talk to it without touching it," he says. "It will constantly be listening for trigger words, and will just do it—pop up a calendar, or ready a text message, or a browser that's navigated to where you want to go."

Users will even speak to computers they wear, like Google's Project Glass. Nuance sources told Technolgy Review that they are actively planning how speech technology would have to be architected to run on wearable computers in the future.




SOURCE  MIT's Technology Review

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