A still small voice?

Tellme of Mountain View California resembles many other start-up companies in Silicon Valley. A large, open office space, a bevy of engineers and programmers from around the world, transport courtesy of scooters strategically placed about the place and a single-minded belief that what they are doing is where it is at, now. TellMe, as the name might suggest is in the speech recognition business, a Voice Portal. Their products recognise, interpret and act upon what you say through what is called interactive voice recognition (IVR). No keyboard, no buttons, just say the word(s).

When you phone the regular toll free PSTN number you hear a list of options, movies, Taxi, restaurants, horoscopes, even Blackjack. Just say the option that interests you and in a few simple words you have the time of your film in the place of your choice or you are put through to your preferred Taxi service, airline and so on.

With more handheld wireless device than computer connections to the Internet in the very near future together with the recent emergence of the open standard VoiceXML extension from the W3 people, voice solutions appear to be very much the flavour of the month.

It has not been an easy task to get this far. Voice recognition, together with its close cousins, text to speech (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ATS), is perhaps coming of age. Text to speech has been given a significant improvement by companies like Learnout and Hauspie with their Realspeak TTS solution and regarding automatic speech recognition, Speechworks offers some impressive demonstrations.

Telecoms operators are far from idle, investing heavily in automatic network voice applications, Omitel with Philips Speech Processing in Italy, France Telecom, AT&T and Bell South in conjunction with SpeechWorks. Established operators also have what other companies would like to possess - an enormous subscriber base. Their challenge is going to be to provide affordable voice solutions so that customers do not go elsewhere.

For perhaps the real competition for telecoms operators will come from Web-based Voice Application Service Providers, who avoid the need for expensive local solutions for voice to text and text to voice and can lock in customers by personalising portal services. Already Yahoo and AOL have made moves in this direction.

Whoever gains the upper hand, what is certain is that the painstaking efforts of linguists and phoneticians, working like the 21^st century equivalents of medieval scribes, analysing and transposing every town, street, business and administrative centre into recognisable form, are slowly but surely, making small voices heard by everyone.

Nigel Barnett January 2001

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