"Prognostication over the phone is popular"
Always nice to see new applications of telephony speech recognition beyond the traditional call-centre -- a recent article from Telecommunications Online "Cell-phone or Microphone" discusses some applications for cell-phone users in Thailand, amongst which horoscopes, fortunes, and:
- mobile karaoke: select a song from a menu (either by title or by singing into the phone), switch to speaker phone status, then sing along, either alone or with friends and loved ones
- dating profiles: A lonely Grammy Thailand subscriber can speak his vital stats into his cell phone... and hope that a potential partner will access his voice profile, listen to his glowing self promotion, then tell the system she’s interested (interesting use of 'he' and 'she' there.. so it's only the blokes that will post their voices?)
I like this bit:
- Contarra [the speech implementers] faced not only a complex language system but also an environment heavily influenced by background noise, video games, competing cell phone conversations and traffic. It designed a smarter application, Skurla [NMS Marketing Director] said.
I would love to know how the app is smart about video games, competing cell phone conversations and traffic. Anyone from Contarra/NMS out there?
