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

Tony Austin
Friday, 24 October 2008 08:44

Opinion and Analysis

First, there are a few general demos here on the Nuance web site.

The first demonstration by Peter Mahoney of Dragon NaturallySpeaking working on a handheld device is this one with InfoWorld reporter Jon Udell done in November 2006 under Dragon version 9 (requires QuickTime player).

A more recent demonstration, done in January 2008, with John Kirsner of the Boston Globe, shows (on its second page) Peter speaking commands to a voice-driven Tom Tom model 920 GPS device.

This is a very interesting demo, because while the device easily recognizes Peter's speech it cannot find the desired street address, despite Peter's best efforts!

Being the professional that he is, Peter follows up the very next day with a YouTube demonstration: Why didn't that speech recognition demo work? (See it also at the bottom of this page.)

It turns out that it was a problem with the Tom Tom database content. The speech recognition technology was not in itself at fault.

This is well worth pondering. It's a problem that crops up all the time across all fields of information technology, and in this case just happened to surface at an embarrassing moment for Peter.

Scott Kirsner's blog, Innovation Economy, has both videos on a single page if you prefer.

I hope you got value from listening to this podcast and viewing the above third-party videos.