Over at Internet2Go, Greg Sterling quotes figures from Gartner forecasting that 50% of the smartphone market will run on the Android OS by 2015. That portends some very positive prospects for speech-enabled mobile services thanks largely to single-button access to speech command on Android phones. As Android’s footprint expands, I expect to see many more articles akin to this one by Slate’s technology columnist Farhad Manjoo.

Google, under the guidance of Mike Cohen, is going to make sure that speech recognition is one of the input options for every activity through an Android-based device or any device running a Chrome-based browser. As reported in Google’s Chrome blog, the beta version of Chrome 11 takes advantage of the W3C’s (World Wide Web Consortium’s) “Speech Input API” in order to support speech-to-text transcription which, in turn, allows for spoken navigation, dictation and command entry.

As I’ve noted in previous posts, the technology works “okay.” It is not 100% accurate and, like all speech recognition resources, it can appear to discriminate against women and individuals whose voices are in registers that correspond to a small sample of collected utterances. But speech-to-text transcription is the gateway technology into a slew of speech-enabled, mobile activities and we expect it to be ubiquitous and its use to grow geometrically as new devices, applications and use cases abound.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Speech recognition, Google, mobile applications, Transcription, translation