The Web's next trick? Talk to me.
Advances in speech-recognition and speech-synthesis software -- plus ever-faster and cheaper computing -- are finally bringing the prospect of a voice-enabled Internet within earshot.
Companies from start-ups, like Tellme and Voxeo, to stalwarts, like IBM and Microsoft, are developing "voice Web" software and services. The business model for the consumer market -- giving people all kinds of free sports, news and weather information from an "800" number, advertised on buses, as Tellme tried -- proved to be elusive.
So the companies, including Tellme, are now focusing on the corporate market.
One big potential application is in so-called voice portals, linked to corporate intranets, for uses like allowing sales people on the road to ask questions and get answers concerning customers, prices and shipments, through the telephone. "It's all about access to corporate data," said Nancy Faigen, president of Voxeo.
Perhaps the most immediate application, though, will be in helping improve the efficiency of the nation's 80,000 call centers, which answer customers' questions and cost a total of roughly US$90 billion a year. Linking speech-recognition software more intelligently to information housed in corporate Web sites and databases will help automate phone customer service. The savings should be great, analysts predict.
Speech-recognition specialists, like Nuance and SpeechWorks International, have been steadily improving their software. Yet the looming challenge is to develop the technology to lash the speech software to the Web data, doing all linking, sorting and translating. As with every other computing technology, standards -- and who controls them -- will be crucial.
The World Wide Web consortium last fall released version 2.0 of VoiceXML, the voice-enabled version of an extensible mark-up language for formatting and classifying the data in Web pages.
But Microsoft and a handful of industry partners have made some enhancements to VoiceXML, creating another standard known as SALT, for speech application language tags.
"You can't ignore anything that Microsoft is backing," Faigen said.
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