THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 31, 1996 TAG: 9603300404
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 110 lines
It's 7 p.m. You're just home from work and you're dying for a pizza. But you can't remember the number for your favorite pizzeria. And you can't find the phone book. And the operator can't seem to find the listing.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could just pick up the phone and say ``pizza'' to be connected to your favorite parlor?
Well, get ready. That day is coming.
By June, Bell Atlantic-Virginia plans to introduce in Hampton Roads, Richmond and Roanoke a service called Easy Voice. For $3.75 a month, it will let subscribers reach out and touch someone simply by uttering their name.
The service, which Bell Atlantic already offers in the Baltimore and Washington areas, is one of a wide range of consumer-oriented speech-recognition services making their way into the marketplace.
Voice-activated applications are also being folded into personal computers, cars and consumer electronics ranging from pocket organizers to VCRs. And service providers like banks, insurance companies and health care institutions are beginning to make use of speech-recognition technologies to help their customers navigate through their information networks.
Most of what's being tried is rudimentary - a far cry from the glib exchange between man and computer routinely portrayed in moviedom's futuristic yarns.
But people who are involved in or analyze the field say it's just a matter of time before speech recognition replaces keyboards and Touch Tone phones as the preferred interface between humans and machines.
``I expect voice-activated interfaces will be widely used not just in telephones, but in all kinds of consumer services and products,'' says Tony Thakur, manager of the voice-activated services group for Bell Atlantic.
Thakur says Easy Voice was largely prompted by the hesitation of some Bell Atlantic customers to subscribe to some Touch Tone-activated features like ``return call'' and ``repeat call.''
By requiring customers to punch extra codes to activate those services, ``we added a degree of complexity that we really should not,'' he says. ``We want to make it as easy as possible for everybody to use our services.''
Eventually, Thakur says, Bell Atlantic will make those and many other services available through voice activation.
But for the time being it is limiting Easy Voice to calling from a pre-selected directory of up to 50 phone numbers. Subscribers set up their personal directories by calling Bell Atlantic and speaking the names and phone numbers of each party into a recording. They can use either rotary or Touch Tone phones.
To actually dial someone listed in that directory, they then pick up the phone and say ``Call'' followed by the name as they recorded it - for instance, ``Call Joe's Pizza.''
Thakur says Bell Atlantic's computer is programmed to allow for variations in the voice prompt and will match the person's command to the name and number that most closely resembles it. So if, for instance, one says simply ``Call pizza,'' Joe's Pizza would be called.
He doesn't recommend customers use Easy Voice for emergency calls, however, because dramatic changes in voice patterns might throw off the system.
Therein lies the greatest limitation of speech-recognition technologies. No matter how sophisticated they become, they will never understand all the complexities of spoken human expression.
Even the simple sentence, ``It's hard to recognize speech'' can be misinterpreted by a computer as, ``It's hard to wreck a nice speech,'' says George Cohen, a spokesman for the Cambridge, Mass.-based Voice Processing Corp., which supplies technology to Bell Atlantic.
And yet, Cohen says, the very superiority of the spoken word as a communications device is also the greatest argument for the development of speech-recognition applications.
The average person can speak at least five times faster than he or she can type. Why, then, make people type or even point and click with a mouse to tell a computer to call up a spreadsheet? Why fumble through three or four steps on a microwave's keypad to thaw a frozen chicken breast? Why not just say what you want instead?
William S. Meisel, editor and publisher of the monthly newsletter Speech Recognition Update in Encino, Calif., forecasts an explosion in voice technologies. He predicts worldwide licensing fees for the technologies paid by companies in the computer, telephone, consumer products and automotive industries will rise from about $500 million this year to nearly $2.8 billion in 2000.
The telephone industry will lead the way, he says. ``They're in the beginning stages of what I call a voice dial tone.''
He points out that cellular carriers are quickly integrating voice-activated dialing into their services - partly because of laws and regulations in various states requiring ``hands-free dialing'' by car-phone users.
Managers for both GTE Mobilnet and 360 Communications, the cellular carriers serving Hampton Roads, said their companies are considering incorporating voice-activated services in their local offerings.
The computer industry, Meisel says, is the second-biggest market for speech recognition. Already, makers like Compaq are shipping PCs with some voice-activation technologies built in.
Meanwhile, in January, Microsoft Corp. announced software that functions as a speaker phone and answering machine and relies on voice-activated modems. Among other things, the software converts electronic mail into voice messages that users can retrieve by calling in via a phone. And it lets users store frequently used numbers in the computer's memory and dial the numbers by uttering a name.
Meisel says automakers are also planning to adapt speech-recognition in their designs.
Soon, he says, it will be possible for drivers of some cars to switch radio stations or display maps and directions to a destination simply by uttering voice commands. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
While Bell Atlantic's voice-activated service is basic compared to
the easy interchanges between man and machine portrayed in movies,
it will let you dial a number by saying a name.
by CNB