Emerging Technology Conference

Looks like I'm going to the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference next week in San Diego.  The theme of the conference is "magic", as in Arthur C. Clarke's famous saying about how sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from it.  We had hoped my boss and world-famous speech scientist Fil Alleva would be presenting, but they'll get me instead.   What could I possibly say about speech as an emerging technology?

I'm thinking I'll talk about how speech is emerging as a bona fide data type, like numbers or text or dates.  In SAT terms, I'll say:

speech is to voice as text is to fax

When you push somebody's voice through a phone line or you save it as an audio file, you end up with the kind of results you have when you send text through a fax machine: a pile of lifeless bits.   Print an email message and fax it; what have you got?  A piece of paper that can be read by one person at a time.  Sure, you can modernize fax with color, fancy routing software, "paperless" delivery and more, but at the end of the day the content is just a bunch of bits.  Same thing with spoken audio:  go ahead and compress it to make it go further, use better microphones to raise the quality, strap on fancy new VOIP features to make it easier to pass it around networks, but it's still just a bunch of bits.

But imagine what happens when audio is transformed into its semantic content.  To use the fax analogy, note how through email that same message can be sorted and searched, routed automatically through metadata like sender/receiver or by keywords, augmented with other data types like sound or video -- tons of features that make it far more useful than fax.  Similarly with speech: what if I can transform an audio stream into its semantic content that can be searched, sorted, classified, and then transformed into other data types?  It'll be like magic!

One nice thing about the conference is that it looks like my old Stanford roommate, Bill Katz is a speaker too.  And Doug Cutting, who I worked with at CSLI for many enjoyable summers.  Can't wait to see them!