Speech Recognition - Assignment Example

Speech Recognition Analysis Report In this age period of technology we find ourselves needing to excel and be on top of new advances. We need to provide the customer updated information, ways in which they are able to excel in their tasks, service their clients, and the bottom line, to be cost/effective as part of our tasks of investing in IT and being part of the research and development division. I am recommending that we use Speech Recognition as a means to reach educational settings (Biever, October 26, 2006; Hauptmann and Wibrok, 1997), military (Hauptmann and Wibrok, 1997); (E. Speech Analysis And Recognition, and Speaker Identification, ND) and businesses (Hauptmann and Wibrok, 1997; Nuance´s Speech Automation Powers 1-800-Yellowpages Service for AT&T, January 3, 2007; Meisel, (1997): MacSpeech announces iListen MX voice control software for the Apple Macintosh (ND)). All three areas have been exposed to this new technology and as investors we will be in the front line, to further reach those many areas that are virgin to the exposure of this new technology (Hauptmann and Wibrok, 1997). I remember that in the 1980´s I was invited to participate in a film production concerning a Recognizance Aircraft Project in Massachusetts, United States of America. You may be familiar with this project since the Recognizance planes are those that from outer space are able to look into micro areas on earth and elsewhere. An example of this, from outer space it is able to pinpoint who is in a car. What is the importance of this? Well, the engineer that was giving us a tour at the laboratory took us to his workstation, to see what we were going to be contracted to film. At his workstation, he showed us a Recognizance planes´ photograph (just as I explained above). He also demonstrated how he had programmed his computer to recognize 100 words. He would, for instance say, zoom in and the camera would zoom in. He would point to the screen where he wanted the camera to zoom in and you could see the enlarged picture. So you see this is not new to me. I have been involved in this type of technology for over two decades. Speech recognition analysis is not new to me. What is speech recognition? Speech recognition in theory, “…can make any spoken words in video or audio media subject to text indexing, search and retrieval”, according to Hauptmann and Wibrok (1997). Shun (2006) concurs. Speech recognition according to Hauptmann and Wibrok (1997), “…is used for transcript creation from video, time alignment of closed-captioned transcripts, a speech query interface, and audio paragraph segmentation”. Meiser (1997) and Shun (2006) concur with this definition. What is the history of speech recognition? According to Garfinkel (1998) the history of speech recognition started in 1936 with ATT&T´s Bell Labs. He states that the majority of the funding and performance were by Universities and the U.S. Government Military and DARPA – Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, and that the technology became a commercial market in the early 1980´s. Covox was the first company to launch it commercially and so did Dragon Systems in 1982. Dragon became the leader in the speech recognition market. It was founded by James and Janet Baker who were graduate students at Rockefeller University in 1970. Since they had limitations of what could be performed at Rockefeller they moved to Carnegie Mellon University. Their research was based on the probability of phonetic sounds in English. After obtaining their doctorate they joined IBM. In 1979 they joined Verbex Voice Systems, a subsidiary of Exxon Enterprises. As a new business Dragon provided Apricot, a British company the first personal computer capability of speech recognition (Garfinkel, 1998). Breveon (2005) states that for over 35 years, engineers and speech specialists have been working together so that a computer recognises speech. Hauptmann and Wibrok (1997) state that according to their results the accuracy of speech recognition, “…varies dramatically depending on the quality and type of data used, but the system is quite useable with only moderate speech recognition accuracy”. Breveon (2005) posits that: “Although many modern speech-recognition programs and devices voice-enable their systems, the terms voice recognition and speech recognition are not synonymous. While both use technology to capture the spoken word, voice recognition and speech recognition have different goals, and run different technologies. Speech recognition is continuous, natural language processing. In contrast, voice recognition uses recordings to determine an individuals identity, an Orwellian twist on todays social security number and fingerprint.” According to the Scottish adopt Speech Recognition from Eckoh (2005), their consumers of energy will be serviced no matter what the circumstances of electrical outages may be. They will have a 24-hour access to an automated telephone that uses speech recognition and will be able to provide service restoration information. As you have already noticed, education, military, and businesses have dealt with speech recognition from its inception. Our company should not stay out of the loop. There is more research to accomplish and there is room in this globalisation era. What are the elements crucial for engaging in a financial venture in speech recognition? The crucial elements to become involved in a financial venture of this kind are that, this is a new state-of-the-art and as you have already observed many educational institutions, the military, and businesses have already bought into it. Many more will continue to buy into it because it is being constantly perfected. I am sure that not only will it be perfected but that new venues will be incorporated into it. Other, such as, health care systems have already bought into it (For The Record, 2005). They state that it is positively used by many healthcare practitioners such as doctors, nurses, physician assistants, pharmacists, administrators, and transcriptionists [sic]. The arts, such as a Norwegian company Opera is including the IBM speech recognition technology to their free browser software (Linux News, 2004). O´Reilly (ND), is using speech recognition as a tool to keep in touch with their clients. They state, “Like all financial services systems, the investment companys system enables the caller to identify and correct an error before a transaction is executed.” Knowland (1995) posits that, “After years of watching speech recognition evolve, many users now feel its ready for full-scale implementation. A large segment of the market will integrate speech recognition with interactive voice response (IVR) systems now in place. Many of these early adopters expect that their speech recognition systems will pay for themselves in a year or less. What is the importance of speech recognition? The importance of speech recognition according to Sound thinking on speech recognition (ND) is that: “…voice is a viable machine control tool. The technology has matured to the point where historical complaints over innaccuracies [sic] are no longer as valid. Speech recognition systems now employ artificial intelligence to refine their accuracy and so actually improve with age.” “…there has been considerable consolidation in the industry, which has made a broad range of functionality available cheaply from a few vendors. Most significantly, speech recognition software maker Nuance Communications (formerly ScanSoft) has, since 2000, acquired a roll-call of speech technology vendors, including Lernout & Hauspie and SpeechWorks.” As an investment company and venture capital company, I recommend buying into a business that is already in existence, but, does not have the years of experience we have in the market or establish a joint venture with them. Why do I suggest this rather than starting from baseline? For the simple reason that the path is already in place and we will have had the existent company´s infrastructure with its trained personnel. We will take the company under our wings and with our expertise: continue training the personnel in speech recognition (Hauptmann and Wibrok, 1997); give all the technical support necessary (Hauptmann and Wibrok, 1997); supply all the necessary equipment (Hauptmann and Wibrok, 1997); give exposure to our speech recognition project (Hauptmann and Wilbrok,1997); ascertain who is in need of our services; directly go to the “punch line” by offering them our services; and, explain why it is cost/effective to annex with us. Why is it an important issue for us? It is an important issue for us because we will be in the forefront of technology. This is not going away. This is just the beginning. The Board Members, the Shareholders, and we will be happy to have taken part of a revolutionary state-of-the-art in technology that has much more to offer than what it is offering up to now. Although it is a revolutionary state-of-the-art, it has its limits and this is where we come in. What do we gain? What we will gain will be the “sky is the limit”. We will: gain exposure; be in the forefront; be seen as pioneers in the future; be leaders in this area, ”the era of technology”; be able to market throughout the world; be able to market into the cosmos with highly trained personnel and equipment that go into the cosmos; be able to reach areas of limited resources people and obtain exposure through our foundations that care for the community at large; be able to deliver an automatic translation, called sub-vocal speech recognition (Biever, October 26, 2006) amongst countries for a better communication; and, continue to obtain a positive (black) bottom line in our financial statements. Mind you, that there are limitations to speech recognition (Biever, October 26; Shun, 2006) where they state that in translations given the phonemes (distortion/transformation of harmonic elements) and words which are not understood by the computer, the computer will assign the sequences and come up with the highest probability to translate a sentence and this is where the venture falls in, by creating a system based that will come up with a correct sentence and not like those used by automatic translators found in web-sites. Generally speaking, these translators still justify the inclusion of a human being to be able to translate. (Biever, October 26) recognises that the system is far and beyond ready to set the pace due to its limitations. Through our trained personnel and experts in the field we will be able to advance the features that have already been designed and enter into other ventures that will be identified by them to continue advancing in this field of speech recognition. This is not an easy task but we have been known to go above and beyond our limits as leaders and as a venture capital company. It is not an easy task but it is not one that is impossible to accomplish. I highly encourage all of us to take part in this business venture and surpass the limits of financial endeavours. We are leaders of the world, we should stay as leaders of the world, and we should excel as leaders of the world. I hope that this report has given you the necessary tools and has enticed you to join into our future as a key element of speech recognition. REFERENCES Breveon http://www.breveon.com/howitworks/SpeechRecognitionTechnology/ Last modified 2005-12-08 11:52. Retrieved from website 1/13/07 1:34 am For The Record (April, 2005). The case for speech recognition. Matt Revis. Vol. 17 No. 9 p.20 http://www.fortherecordmag.com/archives/ftr_042505p20.shtml Retrieved from website 1/13/07 2:15 am Knowland, D. (December, 1995). Speech recognition: Investing for the future with a 12-month return on investment. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3700/is_199512/ai_n8714193 Retrieved from the website 1/13/07 8:48 pm Linux News (2004). Big blue stars in opera voice-recognition technology. Lyman J. http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/33210.html 03/23/04 Retrieved from the website 1/13/07 8:12 pm PT MacSpeech announces iListen MX voice control software for the Apple Macintosh (ND). Retrieved from website 1/10/07 10:35 pm http://www.tmaa.com/recent_articles/macspeech.htm Maybury, M. T. (1997). Intelligent multimedia information Retrieval. Hauptmann, A. G. and Wibrok, M. J. Informedia: New-on-demand multimedia information acquisition and retrieval. pp 213-239. Meisel B. (1997) Speech Strategy News. http://www.tmaa.com/ Retrieved from website 1/10/07 10:25 pm New Scientist Magazine (26 October 2006). Biever, C., It´s the best thing to a Babel fish. p.32. http://www.academia-research.com/files/instr/149181_NewSci_Babelfish_Article.pdf Nuance´s speech automation powers 1-800-yellowpages service for AT&T (January 3, 2007) Retrieved from website 1/10/2007 10:10pm http://www.nuance.com/news/pressreleases/2007/20070110_mobile.asp O´Reilly Safari Books Online (ND). A top-five investment management company: Handling complex two-choice questions. http://safari.oreilly.com/0321154924/ch10lev1sec4 Retrieved from website 1/13/07 8:35 pm Scottish Power Speech Recognition Service from Eckoh (28/11/05). Advanced speech recognition service Eckoh technologies plc keeps consumers in the picture. http://www.eckoh.com/rns_announcements/2005/scottish_power_adopt_speech_recognition_service_from_eckoh.html Retrieved from website 1/13/07 2:18 am Shun. I. (October, 2006). A study of speech recognition based on inner structure. No.9 and87 (E) d, (September, 2006) http://www.geocities.jp/onsei2007/index-e.html 1/10/07 10:52 pm Sound thinking on speech recognition http://www.information-age.com/briefing_rooms/communications/insight/sound_thinking Retrieved from website 1/13/07 1:42 am Read More