Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Google Video Search via Speech Recognition




Finally a hint on the expected Google move to the speech recognition arena.

Google announced at the Official Google Blog, the availability of a new video search capability based on speech recognition.

It was release as a gadget you can embed on your iGoogle homepage and is a good preview of things to come.
The gadget only searches videos uploaded to YouTube's Politicians channels, which include videos from Senator Obama's and Senator McCain's campaigns, as well as those from dozens of other candidates and politicians. It usually takes less than a few hours for a video to appear in the index after it has been published on YouTube.

So apart from congratulations to the google team who are exposed to the public for the first time, how are they compared to other speech recognition engines aimed for broadcast quality? The google team refer to their precision: "While some of the transcript snippets you see may not be 100% accurate, we hope that you'll find the product useful for most purposes." While I do not understand what are the purposes for just searching within the YouTube political channel, people should be aware of much more mature solutions developed in the past years. From the pioneering work of BBN and IBM to the existing online solutions like everyzing, tveyes, blinx, snipp.tv by NSC and more. Based on the perceived quality, the google team has a long way to go in order to get to the first league and to be able to analyze data which is not at broadcast quality. The good news as users is that the YouTube data is easier to process relative to telephony calls speech recognition performed widely today at contact centers by companies like Verint, Nice, Autonomy, Utopy, Nexidia, CallMiner and other players.

Friday, July 11, 2008

SuperHuman Speech Recognition

Last week the the Speech Technologies Group at the IBM Haifa Research Lab (HRL) coordinated a full-day seminar on Speech Technologies. The seminar was a great success with more than 100 participants.

The Keynote presentation at the IBM Speech Technologies Seminar 2008 was: "Superhuman Speech Recognition: Technology Challenges and Market Adoption" by Dr. David Nahamoo, IBM Fellow, Speech CTO and Business Strategist, IBM Watson Research Center. You can view the presentation below. More presentations will be posted soon.




Read this document on Scribd: SuperHuman Speech Recognition Jul 2 2008

Saturday, July 5, 2008

11 Indian languages available from Nuanace


Nuance just extended their Indian languages support. In addition to Hindi and Indian English, they support also: Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Telegu, Bengali, Gujrati, Oriya, and Punjabi.
I wonder what will be an automatic language identification results when trying to discriminate between these languages automaticallyl.




Nuance Communications Launches 9 New Indian Languages for Speech Recognition



By VARIndia Correspondent

Nuance Communications has released 9 new Indian languages for speech recognition in the contact centre...

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