Speech recognition news

Do you ever ask yourself if you are going to need an umbrella today? Or: ‘Where can I get a green tea latte’? Or: ‘What’s up this weekend’? With a new free iPhone 3GS app Siri, you simply ask these questions by talking to your phone. Your question will be interpreted and displayed and suggestions will follow immediately. Very, very cool.

And when you feel like travelling this weekend, you can just continue your questions after ‘what’s up this weekend?’ by asking: ‘How about San Francisco?’, as if you would speak to a real person. Sire will recognize that you’re still interested in something to do for the weekend as it’s context sensitive.

Awesome! Also check out review below the fold showing more examples of how you can use

Steve Di Paola of the Simon Fraser University demonstrated a virtual agent system to Chatbots.org.  This system interprets real time emotions in input such as voice, and shows facial expressions and gestures.

During the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (related to IVA Gala), Steve showed us how his parameterized facial animation system operates. His goal is to develop a system that can handle any face type, behavior, and voice to be used in games, movies and virtual agent worlds. Their current focus is on how emotions should be expressed.

In the first few minutes of the video, he demonstrated various types of faces. Steve grabbed his microphone and started talking. The avatar spoke similar to Steve and his (or her) lips were synchronized with his words. As soon as Steve raised or changed his voice, the avatar acted correspondingly, which was absolutely amazing. It widened its mouth when talking louder; it moved its eyebrow to emphasize what it was saying, and it responded to a drumming sound. Wow!

More explanation and images after break.

A revolutionary interactive 3DTV system is being created by De Montfort University Leicester (DMU), England, researchers. The €4.2 million (approx £3.7 million) project aims to develop a television that can recognise where somebody is sitting in a room and what they wish to view and interact with on their television.

Researchers believe it is a step towards truly interactive 3D video games where gamers use their bodies to control the action without the need for a controller. It could be the next step for Microsoft’s Project Natal.

The project, called HELIUM3D (high efficiency, laser-based, multi-user, multi-modal 3D display) is also exploring ways of allowing viewers who are watching the same television to each view a different channel at the same time and could even let them choose different viewing positions within the image.

For example, groups of people watching a football match in the same room could each pick the part of the stadium from which they would like to experience the action.

Microsoft’s Project Natal delivers a new addon to your XBox that allows you to play without controller. The system has a 3D camera that maps the exacts position of your hands, your fingers, your feet, your header, your nose, everything in a 3D map. This allows you to control the game with only your body, in great detail, and no controller needed. Furthermore, it recognises voice and faces and supports complex video chat.

TellMe for Windows Mobile 6.5 isn’t just an app, it’s a one-button hub for voice commands of all kinds, including text messaging, making calls, and also jumping to Microsoft Live Search with natural language queries like “weather in San Francisco, California,” “pizza in Kansas City” or “mother’s day gift ideas.”

We engage in numerous discussions throughout the day, about a variety of topics, from work assignments to the Super Bowl to what we are having for dinner that evening. We effortlessly move from conversation to conversation, probably not thinking twice about our brain’s ability to understand everything that is being said to us. How does the brain turn seemingly random sounds and letters into sentences with clear meaning?

Carnegie Mellon undergraduates Dan Eisenberg, Kevin Li and Ilya Brin have developed the EyeTable, which is described as “an artificially intelligent dinner table that reads physical gestures and speech patterns and lets the participants know how the date is going—in real time.

Speech recognition technology has matured to a stage where it can be used to increase the efficiency of a call centre and provide a better customer experience, according to research from Callcentres.net.

Dr Catriona Wallace, director of Callcentres.net, told ZDNet Australia that according to a recent survey carried out by her firm, of 500 Australians asked if they minded speaking with an offshore call centre agent, 67 percent said they did.