Recent Comments

Monday, January 26, 2009



Devices that are able to recognize human's speech and identify it are not particularly new. In fact, they are very common. Some mobile phones have voice control features, so do automatic teller machines and recently we have found out a new voice controlled remote control for home media center. The last one is very interesting and we will come back to it later. However most of them are quite simple. Usually they have a number of words preinstalled, which correspond for example to its menu and they have to ask user on every step of the navigation or whatever the voice recognizing software does. To make things better, European researches have come up with idea of easing up the whole process, making it faster. In turn, voice recognition becomes more complicated from the inside. Nevertheless it didn't stop them trying.

For about three years already there is a project going on under the name of "LUNA Project" developing spoken language understanding in multilingual communication systems. They have come up with a lot of different stuff during these years. The one thing that will be borrowed for the recent study is the SLU - the Spoken Language Understanding system. Unlike the majority of voice recognition systems, this one will not have to ask for an action to do at every particular moment while surfing the menu. SLU provides recognition of every word said, and then filtering it. All the interjections like "hmmm", "oh", etc. will be thrown away, the rest of the words will be analyzed and configured into a command for the device. Such a way user can instantly access needed submenu without getting acquainted with all the peculiarities gadget might have. This is actually the same thing that Amulet Remote we have remembered earlier does successfully.

The conclusion is that if Amulet Devices managed to create a usable voice recognition system, no wonder European researchers will not fail. This is now only the matter of time. The best part of the system is that it will be translated in all European Union languages. The final version of it should aid tourists, take orders at fast food restaurants, help with ATM and in fact be useful at any public location out there.

0 comments: