With a vocabulary covering the 2000 most sought-after listings, the Alcatel-based system was initially designed to handle about 15 percent of enquiries to Telstra's directory assistance service. At the same age, an average human child would be able to produce roughly five utterances, and no doubt understand many more as it would be just about to hit the steep side of the early language learning curve. Telstra's voice-recognition software, on the other hand, has to forget some of its words, before it can start to remember any new ones.
It can learn new ways to say the same word - but, unlike the toddler, it can't learn any new ones without explicit intervention.
For the majority of us, this kind of call centre automation is our most likely contact with voice recognition technology. And while call automation, in the form of touchtone technology, has been around for some time, speech recognition vendors are having some success talking up the benefits of their more-expensive systems.
"There are some intangible benefits on the soft side of it all," explains Peter Chidiac, Australian managing director of speech recognition vendor Speechworks. "There is ample evidence of a better customer experience."
According to Chidiac, one of the more tangible benefits of speech recognition technology is its ability to cut through the menus on which touchtone technology depends.
"You can't call into a banking application and say 'what is my stock price?', instead you have to sift through menus," Chidiac says. "Speech recognition offers a smaller foot print for conducting larger transactions."
However, speech recognition goes a lot further than call centre applications. According to IBM's Richard Gray, speech technology within Big Blue is broken into three main areas; speaker dependent unlimited vocabulary, speaker independent limited vocabulary, and command control.
While call centre systems generally depend on speaker-independent-limited-vocabulary systems (ie Telstra's 2000 words, and unlimited customers), speaker-dependent-unlimited-vocabulary first have to "learn" which combinations of sounds the speaker is likely to use to represent different words.
"Think of it as dictation software," Gray says. "You have to read a script and train it to recognise your voice."
Gray says the early adopters of IBM's ViaVoice software are mainly professionals who often find themselves outside the office, such as doctors and lawyers.
"It can take the grind out of dictation, all the PA's have to do when they get the data back is the fine tune the text, rather than type out the whole thing," Gray says.
Command control has been popularised on film and TV. From the sinister user/computer interactions in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odessey, to the more light-hearted banter of Red Dwarf, sci-fi writers introduced speech recognition in all its forms long before the technology was ready to deliver, and the ability to remotely control computers with voice alone is one of the most common.
Gray believes one of the first places such technology will become prevalent is in the car - where hands free access to devices, information services, the Internet and telephones could prove a popular functionality.
IBM's Driver Assistance and Information Systems (or DAISY for short), has already been picked up by DaimlerChrysler, and although it is only available in proto types at car shows at the moment the company is looking to integrate voice control as a standard capability in new cars some time in 2003.
