To send an e-mail by cellphone, just lift your voice
Products turn speech to text, and vice versa, on mobile phones
12:00 AM CDT on Wednesday, March 28, 2007
ORLANDO, Fla. – Mobile Internet sounds like a great idea – until
you try to read an e-mail while you're driving a car or type a long Web
address with your smart phone's microscopic keyboard.
Fortunately,
several vendors arrived in Orlando for CTIA Wireless 2007 with tools
that transform voice to text, and vice versa, and make smart phones
infinitely smarter.
The most impressive product is a
voice-recognition system from Nuance Communications Inc. that lets
users control their phones without lifting a thumb.
The Nuance
system goes far beyond the "Call Bob" sort of voice control that many
high-end cellphones have offered for years. Without requiring any
training to acclimate it to your voice, Nuance allows users to dictate
entire e-mails or to surf Web sites or ask their phones for directions.
A user might say, "E-mail to Bob Jones. Subject: Tomorrow's
Meeting. Text: Sorry to do this, Bob, but an emergency is forcing me to
cancel."
The user's voice will be sent to Nuance computers,
which will create an e-mail and send it back for approval in about 10
seconds. A simple "send" ships the e-mail on its way.
A
business traveler who wants dinner after a late meeting can ask the
phone to search for "Italian restaurants in Dallas," and it will come
back with listings.
"We're working to integrate our system with
GPS devices inside phones so the phone knows exactly where the user is
when he searches for restaurants," said Daniel D. Zito, director of
Nuance Voicecontrol.
"It will automatically show the closest
possible restaurants and then give turn-by-turn directions to whatever
restaurant a user selects."
Nuance is currently available for
$6 a month on most smart phones, but only on the Sprint Nextel Corp.
network. That will change soon, however.
Mr. Zito said that the
company will announce deals with other wireless carriers in the next
couple weeks and that it is working to expand beyond PDA-style
cellphones to any device that is Internet-capable.
Nuance,
which currently limits messages to 20 words, is also developing a
product that will read e-mails aloud so that users can stay in touch
when they are driving or doing something else that precludes reading.
A
similar service is already available from a Toronto company called
Voice on the Go. System users can use vocal commands to access their
e-mails or text messages and to send e-mails or text messages as audio
files. Its system does not translate voice into text.
"People
want to be productive when they're in the car, but text-based systems
really don't lend themselves to that," said John McLeod, the company's
chief operating officer.
"Until now, the only options have been
to waste the time or to endanger yourself and other drivers. We feel
our system is much better than either," he said.
Of course, for every person who wants to hear e-mail as voice mail, there is another who wants to read voice mails as e-mails.
This
paper recently reviewed a service called SimulScribe that does just
that. A competing service called SpinVox has rented a large booth at
CTIA and is offering users a chance to try its service free for a year.
The company's Web site, www.spinvox.com, will walk users through the sign-up process.
Given
the difficulty of typing on miniature keyboards, voice recognition
would seem a natural application for mobile phones, and all of the big
Internet companies are clearly working on it.
Microsoft Corp. recently spent nearly $1 billion to acquire a major maker of speech-recognition software.
Yahoo representatives at the Orlando convention say they are actively working on speech recognition for local search.
And Google?
Google
representatives, when asked about voice recognition, smiled broadly and
said, "Nothing we're willing to discuss at this time."
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