Wireless users today largely talk on their phones, but in the near future they may begin talking to their phones.
Woburn, Mass.-based VoiceSignal Technologies Inc. has developed what the company calls a “speaker-independent” voice-recognition technology that has been skimmed down for mobile phones. Like something out of a science-fiction tale, the offering essentially allows users to navigate their phone by speaking to it, and does not require users to train the phone to recognize the names in their address book.
For example, a user could say “call Mike’s mobile,” and the VoiceSignal technology stored in the phone would look up Mike’s mobile phone number in the phone’s address book, and then begin dialing that number. The user doesn’t have to train the phone beforehand-as some previous speech-recognition technologies required-by repeating each name in the address book until the phone can recognize it.
What’s even more impressive, VoiceSignal has developed a dictation technology that would allow users to send e-mails and messages without wearing out their thumbs. Instead of pressing the 7 key three times just to get to the letter S, users would be able to speak the message to the phone and then say “send.”
“With one utterance, all of a sudden you can access everything,” said Rich Geruson, VoiceSignal’s chief executive officer.
Although it might sound too good to be true (pun intended), Geruson explains that the “proof is in the pudding.” VoiceSignal has racked up major deals with the likes of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Motorola Inc. and Nokia Corp. Indeed, the company-which this quarter will be cash-flow positive-has shipped its technology in more than 20 million phones. Further, the company recently scored deals with Nokia for its new 7610 camera phone and with PalmOne Inc. for its new Treo 650 smart phone.
“We’ve hit a new level of activity,” Geruson said.
VoiceSignal’s technology relies on standard voice-recognition algorithms, but uses proprietary techniques to shrink the software down to around 360 kilobytes-small enough to be stored on most mid-range mobile phones.
Geruson said VoiceSignal’s dictation technology will be commercially available early next year through an as-yet-unnamed handset vendor. The dictation package takes up almost 1.5 MB of memory and requires the user to spend a few minutes training the phone, but will change how you use a phone.
