www.getdesign.in - My periodic blog exploring the world of business, experience design and interaction, with a smattering of gadgetry and social media. A world where business, people and technology meet.
Let's Fix Things: For over two decades I've been consulting in Communications Design: Everything from business strategy and processes, through to technology, interaction and customer experience. The thoughts here are my own, not necessarily that of my employer.
I have a penchant for spotting patterns and fixing broken user and customer experiences. Even my Bumblebee project hasn't escaped - I've been using Six Sigma techniques to study and predict their behaviour patterns. ☺
Mike Cohen, part of Google’s Speech Technology team (as a note, he is also deaf), spoke via sign language to talk about his team’s work on video. This press conference is about YouTube and accessibility to the disabled, specifically the deaf. It’s also about YouTube’s new auto-captioning technology, which is rolling out to everybody today.
[Nik's comment: it has to be said, appointing 5 suppliers as the outcome of a tendering process seems rather like skipping the tendering process! We await annoucements from the other 3!]
SRC appointed as a supplier under a four year framework agreement with the NHS Yorkshire and Humber Collaborative Procurement Hub (YHCPC). This agreement covers the deployment of SRC's digital dictation, voice recognition and outsourced transcription solutions to over 200 Acute, Mental and Primary Care Trusts.
BigHand has announced that following a tender and evaluation process, the NHS Yorkshire and Humber Commercial Procurement Collaborative has selected BigHand along with 5 other providers for the provision of digital dictation workflow software and speech recognition technology.
MacSpeech, Inc. today announced the release and immediate availability of MacSpeech Dictate Medical, the medical professional's speech recognition solution for the Macintosh.
Designed specifically for the medical and dental professional and their support staff, MacSpeech Dictate Medical empowers dictating text directly into applications and practice management systems, and issuing numerous commands by voice, on the Macintosh. MacSpeech Dictate Medical includes a digitally enhanced, USB headset microphone.
SHAPE Services GmbH today announced the availability of a speech recognition feature in IM+, the mobile instant messenger. SHAPE has joined forces with Yap Inc., pioneer of the first fully automated voice-to-text platform, to add the first of its kind, thumbs-free message dictation feature to IM+ for BlackBerry(R) smartphones.
IM+ with speech recognition will allow users to dictate their instant messages and send them as text to their contacts in Facebook(R), AIM(R)/iChat, MSN(R)/Windows Live(TM) Messenger, Yahoo!(R), ICQ(R), Jabber(R), Google Talk(TM) and MySpaceIM. Recent studies indicate that over 70% of consumers prefer using voice to interact with their mobile devices rather than typing. Speech-enablement increases message creation speed and greatly improves the usability of instant messaging on mobile devices.
East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust has been able to reduce cancer diagnosis times by deploying digital dictation with speech recognition from SRC.
The new technology is allowing pathologists to dictate results in real-time. As a result, histology reporting turnaround times have been cut from a week to often the same day.
Paul Williams, head of BMS cellular pathology at East Kent said: “It has been invaluable in helping us to improve reporting turnaround times and eradicate typing backlogs in spite of increasing workloads. Another, unexpected benefit has been freeing up secretarial staff to train in laboratory duties.”
ShoutOUT enables iPhone users to dictate the text they'd like to use over the phone, then, check the transcribed message for errors, if any, and send the short message service (SMS) to their desired numbers.
The new technology from Promptu is the latest example that substantiates the growing importance of advanced messaging applications in the consumer marketplace. With the number of SMS text messages expected to cross 2.3 trillion by next year and several U.S. states making texting illegal while driving, voice recognition SMS is in high need.
HCA International, a central London healthcare facility has rolled-out speech recognition-based radiology reporting on 12 sites. The technology has reduced average report creation times to 2:40 minutes from 24 hours previously. Adoption levels among radiologists surpassed the initial goal of 60% by the end of the project: with two-thirds of the roll-out complete, more than 96% of the dictations are already processed through speech recognition. [click heading for more]
If people who finish your sentences drive you crazy, it's a safe bet that you're probably not going to be nuts about new software that can do just that.
It's been dreamed up as a speech-recognition equivalent to the predictive texton cellphones. Mutter a half-considered thought into the microphone and the software will plunder a database to complete half-formed words or sentences - in Japanese, at least.
The system looks for fragments of words and other signs of hesitation such as filler sounds that Japanese speakers use when searching for their next phrase, just as English speakers "um" and "er".
It can work backwards too. If you're using the voice-controlled jukebox made to demo the idea and ask for a song by "someone, er, Jackson" it will offer up Michael, Janet, and even Joe.
You can imagine how that could be useful for requesting songs from a car's stereo while driving, or requesting a new location from a GPS device. [click heading for more]
Technology that once seemed best suited for unintentional comedy is now ready for practical application. Software for text and speech recognition is now sufficiently mature to be considered for general office use, say the editors of the Hanover- based iX magazine. Text recognition or optical character recognition (OCR), requires just a standard multi-functional scanner with 300 dpi performance or better to produce decent results. None of the programs tested by the magazine showed any glaring weaknesses.
Speech recognition is a far more complex process, though, and requires more from the user. An extensive training text typically must first be read into the computer to achieve decent accuracy results. And in some cases specialised dictionaries must be purchased as well to get the software up to speed.
Yet once speech recognition software has been trained, there's no longer any need for exaggerated pronunciation and slow speech. The user can simply speak normally. Only minor differences were found in results between the different speech and text recognition programs. [click heading for more]
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