Audio signal processing provider enhances Cirrus voice processing algorithms.

Customers can use voice to perform commands, find program content.

When battling an IVR, there's not always a clear winner.

Speech has to step up or risk becoming 2011's Symbian.

Most devices from a few years ago are already obsolete.

Discussions of CCXML lead to a battle of the ages.

Speech is absent from the latest social networking innovations.

Speech remains unable to keep us focused on the task at hand.

Sci-fi paves the way for further TTS exploration

A new platform could cut the time spent needlessly on the phone

Questions to ponder as we advance audio-mining capabilities.

Too much personalization in your IVR can lead to trouble.

For better user interactions, the speech world could learn from Twitter.

Though technology has advanced, speech is still a second-class citizen.

Many baby steps versus one giant leap

Today's solutions are more accurate and easier to use and implement.

Free services expand as technology moves out of the niche.

Saying Hello to the new iPhone will go unanswered

Regulations are enforcing stricter authentication for financial institutions, generating more opportunity for voice biometrics

Setting metrics for measuring the success of speech applications goes beyond recognition rates

Automated speech VUIs(voice user interfaces) have exposed us to a variety of greetings: Hey there! How may I help you? In your own words, describe the purpose of your call. Please press or say your account number. And the ever popular, This call may be monitored for training purposes. Well, at least most firms are getting better than the Your call is important to us, but not much.

Last June, Microsoft held an event in San Francisco where top executives demonstrated new software and hardware components that round out its Unified Communications (UC) solutions stack, and, to use Bill Gates' terminology, "make it easy for people to reach each other using the mode of communication that is the most productive, on the device that is most convenient." Its partners - including LG-Nortel, Polycom, and Thomson Telecom (based in Australia) - set out to define hardware and software that fill out a solution stack for enterprise IP-telephony. Other members of its hardware consortium include Motorola, Samsung, Plantronics, Tatung, Logitech and Siemens.

Bringing automated speech to a vertical, like health care, is not merely transcending a doctor's illegible handwriting or obviating the need for off-shore transcription services. The opportunity lies in rendering well-understood, repetitive activities as XML-based scripts in a way that leverages an installed base of processors, applications and databases.

We are now half way through the first decade of the new millennium. It's time to take stock of the factors that have had the greatest influence on automated speech's progress into enterprise and service provider IT infrastructures as a major component of Conversational Access Technologies (CAT).

As a growing number of enterprises make their conversion to VoIP (Voice over IP) or IP telephony, the notion of automated speech is getting short shrift.

Sometimes it helps to have multiple personalities. However, it is generally not helpful when someone else borrows one of these personalities to make unauthorized purchases on one's charge account. For phone-based access to financial services, health records, technical support or more routine customer care, "conversational sign on," which mixes voice biometrics with multi-factor authentication methodologies, should be the preferred method for identity validation. …

“Listen to the voice of experience!” So I’ve been told by my mentors dating back to kindergarten and on through graduate school. Here in the year of “Sideways,” let me strongly suggest to my readers that it will be much more productive if you “listen to the experience of voice,” and I’ll clarify that directive by saying that I’m not just referring to the so-called voice user interface (VUI). I’m talking about the elements up…

If the combination of SpeechTEK, TVUI and SAXPO has any common denominator, it is this: We have made great strides in educating ourselves about the power of standards and the Internet in making 'insanely great' self-service, telephone-based applications.