Speak Easy and Say Anything

ComputerWorld’s latest issue has an article on speech recognition. I’m a re-entrant to the speech world – I started thinking about it again earlier this year, after more than 10 years away from the field – so I like to read these surveys.

Verizon’s Fari Ebrahimi gets a mention for the system they put in place based on ScanSoft’s technology. I remember seeing him at SpeechTek in March.

They mention Nuance’s “Say Anything” technology, which is essentially a trick for allowing recognition of short phrases rather than simple words or “tri-grams”. We talk about this in the speech components group, of course, and whether it should be a priority for future releases. I know from experience using the AT&T Wireless system that it just doesn’t work very well—at least, not well on the kinds of questions I want to speak.