December 2nd, 2007 Curt Monash
Linda asked me about the state of desktop dictation technology. In particular, she asked me whether there was much difference between the latest version and earlier, cheaper ones. My knowledge of the area is out of date, so I thought I’d throw both the specific question and the broader subject of speech recognition out there for general discussion.
Here’s much of what I know or believe about speech recognition:
- Most major independent commercial speech recognition efforts have wound up being merged into Nuance Communications. That goes for both desktop and server-side stuff. None was doing particularly well before its respective merger.
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Posted in Natural language and speech recognition, Natural language processing (NLP), Nuance and Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Speech recognition, Sybase and Answers Anywhere | 7 Comments »
November 30th, 2007 Curt Monash
NEC announced research-level technology that lets a cellphone automatically translate from Japanese into English. The key idea is that they are generating text output, not speech, which lets them sidestep pesky problems about accuracy. I.e. (emphasis mine):
One second after the phone hears speech in Japanese, the cellphone with the new technology shows the text on the screen. One second later, an English version appears. …
“We would need to study how to recognise [sic] voices on the phone precisely. Another problem would be how the person on the other side of the line could know if his or her words are being translated correctly,” he said.
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Posted in Natural language and speech recognition, Natural language processing (NLP), Speech recognition | No Comments »
July 16th, 2007 Curt Monash
I dropped by Progress a couple of weeks ago for back-to-back briefings on Apama and EasyAsk. EasyAsk is Larry Harris’ second try at natural language query, after the Intellect product fell by the wayside at Trinzic, the company Artificial Intelligence Corporation grew into.* After a friendly divorce from the company he founded, if my memory is correct, Larry was able to build EasyAsk very directly on top of the Intellect intellectual property.
*Other company or product names in the mix at various times include AI Corp and English Wizard. Not inappropriately, it seems that Larry has quite an affinity for synonyms …
EasyAsk is still a small business. The bulk is still in enterprise query, but new activity is concentrated on e-commerce applications. While Larry thinks that they’ve solved most of the other technical problems that have bedeviled him over the past three decades, the system still takes too long to implement.
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Posted in BI integration, Mercado, Natural language and speech recognition, Natural language processing (NLP), Progress and EasyAsk, Speech recognition | No Comments »
February 28th, 2007 Curt Monash
I caught up with Dennis Moore today to talk about SAP’s search strategy. And the biggest thing I learned was – it’s not about the search. Rather, it’s about a general interface, of which search and natural language just happen to be major parts.
Dennis didn’t actually give me a lot of details, at least not ones he’s eager to see published at this time. That said, SAP has long had a bare-bones search engine TREX. (TREX was also adapted to create the columnar relational data manager BI Accelerator.) But we didn’t talk about TREX enhancements at all, and I’m guessing there haven’t really been many. Rather, SAP’s focus seems to be on:
A. Finding business objects.
B. Helping users do things with them.
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Posted in BI integration, Enterprise search, Natural language and speech recognition, Natural language processing (NLP), SAP AG and TREX, Search and text storage | 1 Comment »
February 15th, 2007 Curt Monash
InQuira and Mercado both have broadened their marketing pitches beyond their traditional specialties of structured search for e-commerce. Even so, it’s well worth talking about those search technologies, which offer features and precision that you just don’t get from generic search engines. There’s a lot going on in these rather cool products.
In broad outline, Mercado and InQuira each combine three basic search approaches:
- Generic text indexing.
- Augmentation via an ontology.
- A rules engine that helps the site owner determine which results and responses are shown under various circumstances.
Of the two, InQuira seems to have the more sophisticated ontology. Indeed, the not-wholly-absurd claim is that InQuira does natural-language processing (NLP). Both vendors incorporate user information in deciding which search results to show, in ways that may be harbingers of what generic search engines like Google and Yahoo will do down the road.
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Posted in InQuira, Mercado, Natural language processing (NLP), Ontologies and context identification, Search and text storage, Structured search | 2 Comments »
September 1st, 2006 Curt Monash
I’m hearing the same thing from multiple BI vendors, with SAS being the most recent and freshest in my mind — customers want them to “integrate” with Google OneBox. Why Google rather than a better enterprise search technology, such as FAST’s? So far as I’ve figured out, these are the reasons, in no particular order:
- Price.
- Ease of installation (real or imagined).
- The familiar Google brand name.
- The familiar Google UI.
- Google OneBox’s ability to search relational records, reports, etc. along with more tradtional record types.
The last point, I think, is the most interesting. Lots of people think text search is and/or should be the dominant UI of the future. Now, I’ve been a big fan of natural language command line interfaces ever since the days of Intellect and Lotus HAL. But judging by the market success of those products — or for that matter of voice command/control — I was in a very small minority. Maybe the even simpler search interface — words jumbled together without grammatical structure — will win out instead.
Who knows? Progress is a funny thing. Maybe the ultimate UI will be one that responds well to grunts, hand gestures, and stick-figure drawings. We could call it NeanderHAL, but that would wrong …
Posted in BI integration, Enterprise search, FAST, Google, Natural language processing (NLP), SAS, Search and text storage | 1 Comment »
June 9th, 2006 Curt Monash
If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably familiar with a saying that illustrates some of the basic challenges of disambiguation:
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
But did you know who said it first? I didn’t until recently.
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Posted in Humor, Natural language and speech recognition, Natural language processing (NLP), Speech recognition | 6 Comments »