One of the roles of this blog is to highlight successful integration of speech processing and voice user interfaces into activities in an increasingly multimedia world. My habit is to call them “speechable moments” and I believe that they will be the foundation for adoption of speech processing technologies, while dramatizing that such success is predicated on positive results and a gratifying user experience rather than just fulfilling on the promise of greater accuracy in recognition engines or lower latencies in response times from resources in the cloud.

Yesterday the “Inside Facebook” blog featured this post about a service called VoxCard, which enables the denizens of Facebook to festoon their friends’ or their own walls with talking postcards. They start by adding the VoxCard application to their Facebook account. Then, albeit en Francais, they can choose a character from a gallery that includes of celebrity caricatures, popular icons or quirky personalities. They can then choose and customize a standards message or type in an original message from scratch.

Messages can be posted to the originators “wall” or to the wall of a friend. As alternatives they can be embedded in messages to any number of people in the Facebook member’s contact list. When the recipient clicks on the card, it recites the message in the character’s voice (with a French accent bien sur). According to the Inside Facebook post, there app is seeing about 200,000 “active monthly users,” a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of people on the popular social networking platform. Still, it is there for all to see, hear and play around with.

L4 Systems’s Connected TV is a bit different. It is not yet available for all to see, hear and play around with. Instead, the company will debut its technology in the fall, to coincide with the introduction of Google TV, Tivo Premiere and a forthcoming Yahoo! TV (which I have not seen mention of elsewhere). The Seattle area software company has determined that it is not too early to debut and demo its flagship software product which aims to deliver “an always-available visual and speech recognition user interface to interact with features in the living room and on the go.”

It plans a simultaneous release of two applications. L4 Connected TV and L4 Connected TV Mobile. Together they turn an iOS phone, Android or Blackberry into a voice navigation module for “Connected TV” products, including “Yahoo Connected TV” running on on Samsung, Sony, Vizio or LG sets; Google TV and TiVo. This will provide users with the ability to navigate an aggregation of content that includes social networks, local search and music. The sources, as noted in the company’s press release, will include Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Blogger, Bing, and Apple iTunes or Amazon Music Store. A relatively static “demo” with screen shots can be viewed here.

The fall season promises to bring a number of speechable moments to the TV-watching public. GoogleTV includes voice control in its offering already. Mobile dictation specialist Promptu got its start as AgileTV, a company whose charter was to provide voice-based control of the cable TV program guide and program selection process. The addition of L4 to the mix of technology providers is a tacit admission that navigating all the content, features and services offered through TV screens today and the future is getting complicated and voice commands should serve as the most efficient way to cut through the clutter.

Categories: Articles

Tags: mobile speech, voice command, Video