Speech Recognition: Voice Browsing

"Imagine having your e-mails read out to you, carrying out an automated
banking or stock trading transaction, inquiring weather forecasts and listening
to traffic reports in a hands-free eyes-free manner while on the move, all via
voice-activated services?"

Still not convinced? Over the telephone, speech recognition expands the way
callers get information quickly and perform many types of everyday transactions
by using their voice and an automated system. These technologies let users
access and manage information and stored content from any website or database
that is of interest to them, using their ‘own voice’ via conventional
telephones or mobile phones.

In today’s competitive market place, businesses need to enhance their
communications offerings and strive for differentiation. Touch-tone menus and
other automated customer service applications could be counter-productive, as
the caller has to ‘wait for the operator’, ‘press one for....’ or ‘listen
to long menus’. Speech will allow companies to bring a natural flow of
communication through an automated system right to their customers and deliver
value through voice. Speech technology will make businesses stand out from the
crowd, as they can extend their service offerings to anyone who has a phone.

That is why speech is a breakthrough technology. It is estimated that by the
end of 2005, there will be 128 million speech-enabled users, with nearly 50
percent being considered as regular users. Customers and businesses will
immediately understand the benefits of speech.

Several emerging standards are now driving the next-generation of speech
services. VoiceXML and session initiation protocol (SIP) are having a great
impact on the development of speech services. The voice extensible markup
language (VoiceXML) describes an interaction between a caller and a server over
the telephone. SIP–a call control protocol developed to assist in providing
advanced telephony services like routing/load balancing and location services–is
a leading industry standard likely to impact the speech market.

Even though acceptance of speech systems worldwide has gathered pace, certain
questions still remain unanswered. Who will adopt this technology and at what
price? Will the end user readily accept this?

In India, there has been limited activity in the ‘voice Web’ arena, which
involves scientific computing and application design. Talent in India is
available in abundance and as the awareness and demand for voice technology
catches on, we will see a few companies springing up and providing these
solutions. There are however, a few companies that have taken the initiative to
tap the emerging potential and have developed their very own ready-to-deploy
voice platforms and custom voice applications.

The ‘voice Web’ in the real sense is a merging of the telephone networks
and the Internet. The consumer will be exposed to more and more speech
applications, which will be developed and deployed in-house or outsourced to
application service providers. These applications will initially be accessible
one at a time and provide a particular set of services, as they will be running
in isolation from other services or service providers.

Getting these isolated bits and pieces together will provide the caller with
more flexibility, as they will be able to obtain more value
during the course of a single phone call. With the ability to ‘jump to’, ‘browse’
or ‘access’ content or information in an uninterrupted manner, enterprises
will automatically be able to reach out to a larger audience. Imagine, after
checking the availability of a book with a particular seller, a buyer can
immediately arrange for its pick-up through a courier company.

With the evolution of ‘voice Web’, it will not be long before the caller
will be able to enjoy unlimited and uninterrupted access to a virtually infinite
quantum of content via voice.

Prashant Lamba director and
co-founder Phonologies India