An Israeli firm called Nuiti now offers a “platform” for Web site operators and Web developers to offer hands-free, “natural user interface” for their resources. As an example, Nuiti offers this video depicting how e-cooking specialist, KitchenPC.com employs Nuiti’s FireSay InPage to provide truly hands-free access to its site. Users need only utter “Start Cooking,” to get the computers attention and begin text-to-speech-based read-outs of recipes and cooking instructions.

The company’s stock-in-trade is to apply its research and development energy toward “filling gaps” in the current speech processing technologies. CEO Ehud Halberstam had worked with the team of engineers at Microsoft who launched the Windows Phone 7 operating system and attendant services (including its voice user interface). Nir Segal, VP of Marketing and Business Development, managed the user experience development team for MediaMind Technologies, a global company whose core product is a platform for multichannel, rich digital advertising campaign management.

In a wide-ranging conversation this morning, we discussed how building a “delightful hands-free experience” should not necessarily depend on such “trigger words.” Indeed, as the Kinect system from Halberstam’s old employer Microsoft demonstrates, the addition gesture and video serves to improve the system’s ability to understand a user’s intent without resorting to the use of a keyboard or physical mouse.

Today, Nuiti employas core speech processing technology from Microsoft and have put together two families of solutions. FireSay InPage supports hands-free command and control of Web sites (a la KitchenPC.com). FireSay VoiceAds provides a voice based mechanism for delivery of advertising and promotional messages across multimodal channels.

Categories: Articles

Tags: user experience, hands-free services, speech processing