Speech technologies were seemingly alive and well at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, although I was not. Standing by my sad, but seemingly repetitive tradition of not attending CES, although I’ve always wanted to, I could only stand by and read what happened there. Happily though, it seems that speech technologies made more, but minor waves in the consumer end of things with both speech recognition and text-to-speech being employed in a numerous areas, including in automotive navigation and in-vehicle entertainment systems, personal navigation systems (PNDs), gaming consoles, and desktop applications. In fact, the “big man on campus” speech tech vendor, Nuance, claims to have had their technology inside over 100 products at CES.
So what areas were hot? Automakers, for example, were in full force with all sorts of toys for cars; including a driverless car – ahem. I’m not sure what to make of that – and all manner of GPS navigation goodies, such as Pioneer’s new AVIC-F500BT hybrid navigation system that is both in-dash and portable. In addition to providing speech-enabled navigation, the AVIC-F500BT acts as an entertainment media center, enabling users to use their voice to control both iPods and Bluetooth-enabled cellphones. Raytel similarly announced a whole array of Bluetooth, hands-free mobile communications and multimedia entertainment devices for use in cars. It’s worth visiting their web site to check them out.
Speaking of navigation, on the mobility front new speech additions have been made to portable GPS devices, such as Garmin’s new nuvi 880, which allows users to request location information for businesses, get driving directions and navigate using their voice, ask the system where they are to get their own location and nearby business information, and connect with MSN Direct to get all manner of weather and news information. Plus it does this in multiple languages including American and British English, European French, Netherlands Dutch, German, Spanish and Italian. In addition, Sony entered the navigation market with two portable navigation devices that use text-to-speech – the NV-U73T and NV-U83T. Magellan, a big player in the navigation market, brought eight new navigation models to show off too. Magellan made additional news this week by announcing a partnership with Google to allow consumers to do voice search.
Speech was also big in mobile phones and information services for such things as voice dialing, text messaging, and voice search. One example is Sensory Inc.’s announcement that BlueAnt Wireless, a manufacturer of Bluetooth peripherals, will use Sensory's BlueGenie voice interface in the BlueAnt V1. The BlueAnt V1 will be the first Bluetooth headset with a true voice user interface (VUI) using both speech recognition and text-to-speech for voice control and output functionality. Pushing just one button to activate it, users can simply command the headset by saying things like "volume up" and "accept call" and BlueGenie's speech synthesis will give status feedback on the command to the user.
On a fun and final note, I wish I had been in the audience to hear Bill Gates final CES speech (in which he touted speech rec, by the way), but I did get to see the humorous video that went along with it, spoofing his last day at Microsoft. It was really quite clever and well done. You can check it out here.