IBM Develops Technology To Talk To Web

ProgramErgoSum writes to tell us that IBM's Indian-based research arm is trying to bring a new dimension to web interaction through voice interaction on your mobile phone. Developing a new protocol, Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP), the hope is to allow users to talk to the web and get a response. Without more explanation I'm hoping this goes about as far as the gopher web. "The spoken web is a network of voice sites or interconnected voice and the response the company got in some pilot projects in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat and the kind of innovations that people came up with were just mind-boggling, Gupta said. "

Re:Achilles says "No."

[DragonWriter]

Voice tech has an achilles heel: It's called accents. Most voice software works great for english-speaking people in the midwestern United States.

If that's true of this software developed by IBM's Indian research arm and pilot tested in Andhra Pradesh [wikipedia.org] and Gujarat [wikipedia.org], then I suspect it will also handle a lot of other English-speaking people.

But if you have an accent

As if English-speaking people from the midwestern United States don't.

Re:Waste of Bandwidth

[CarpetShark]

When you're talking about millions of terminals vs. relatively few servers, the "dumb" terminals are cheap. Also, doing good voice recognition requires beefy hardware -- probably, ideally, DSP/GPU accelerator boards or a google-style huge cluster of commodity PCs. Finally, for blind users, but also for others, listening to even the best synthesized voice gets tiring/grating after a while. It's much nicer to listen to good speech from a professional narrator, over even a normal human speaker, much less a "good" voice synth.

I still think it'd be better for everyone if they worked on supporting a globally usable standard that could be applied on any machine, like CSS aural media, though. TTS and voice recog is probably the future anyway, might as well start taking it seriously now.

Re:Achilles says "No."

[lennier]

"English-speaking with a midwestern accent is generally viewed [BY AMERICANS] as the most easily understood amongst all english accents; And this accent is the one used for many (if not most) [AMERICAN] television reporters, voice recordings intended for mass [AMERICAN] audience, etc. Most other accents are defined [BY AMERICANS] by how they mangle certain syllables."

Fexed thaht fah yah.