Nuance VP Peter Mahoney, on speech recognition benefits and futures (iTWire podcast)

Tony Austin
Friday, 24 October 2008 08:44

Opinion and Analysis

In this podcast with Peter Mahoney, VP of worldwide sales for Nuance Communications, get an update on Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, and find out more about speech recognition, its benefits and potential, products such as Google Android and Palm Treo with embedded Nuance technology, and where speech recognition is headed.

iTWire readers may recall that I have spoken earlier about Dragon NaturallySpeaking just before version 10 was released with Derek Austin — not a relative of mine — of Nuance's Australian office.

I was unable to visit Sydney and catch up with Peter Mahoney, VP of Worldwide Sales for Nuance, when he paid a flying visit to Australia some weeks ago, so called him recently and recorded a podcast for you.

You can download the podcast with Peter Mahoney from here (MP3 format, file size 9.8 MB, duration 24:47).

Peter has been working in the speech recognition field for quite a while, so his views are well worth listening to. As you might expect, he uses Dragon NaturallySpeaking all the time to enhance his personal productivity.

This podcast covers a wide range of speech recognition technology topics, including:

• - The valuable new features and performance enhancements of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10. For example, the great new way to launch web searches (such as "Search maps for Indian restaurants near Melbourne, Australia") using a single command rather than the multiple sequence of commands needed in previous versions.
• - Nuance's revenue comes mainly from a broad set of speech products, across multiple industries.
• - Are we approaching the "death of the keyboard?"
• - Do small handheld devices have the processing power to drive comprehensive speech recognition?
• - Nuance's server-side speech recognition offerings.
• - Working with Google on speech recognition aspects of its Android platform, plus carriers and web service companies.
• - Improving algorithms for speech recognition.
• - Supporting speech recognition across multiple spoken languages and cultures, and the benfits of speech recognition where literacy is low.
• - Product directions: constant focus on recognition accuracy, responsiveness, and broader understanding of spoken commands.
• - Speech input, using Nuance technology, for such things as in-car navigators.
• - Who is using speech recognition, and what are the the trends? (Peter gave an example of s private girls school in Sydney. Field reporting is another growth area.)
• - Training? ... Enrolment (teaching Dragon, now much improved) versus yourself learning how to best use speech recognition, and you must also understand that dictation needs a somewhat different orientation or methodology from typing.

If you haven't seen Dragon NaturallySpeaking working with handheld devices, I'd recommend that you take a look a couple of demonstrations by Peter Mahoney that are listed on the next page.

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