Word of mouth: the future of speech recognition

A company should have faith in a technology if it gives it the highest of high-profile ad campaigns. In the UK, mobile phone network operator, Orange, clearly has that in a technology which, up until now, hasn't enjoyed the best reputation: speech recognition. Tony Hallett investigates

In mid-July, Orange announced its Wildfire voice-activated electronic assistant service in the valuable advertising minutes before the Star Wars prequel. The cinema ad is part of a £10m media blitz. The launch has been greeted with some scepticism due to the 'failure' of many PC-based voice recognition systems. However, Orange's telephone-based service does not work in the same way as software from the likes of Dragon, IBM and Lernout & Hauspie. The trouble with products from these companies is that they're often hard to use because of the PC's limitations. Some PC vendors thought voice recognition would be the killer app, with users upgrading to more powerful - and higher-margin - PCs to see the benefits of the technology. That hasn't really happened. The budget PC as Web client has won the day. However, Wildfire and other telephony services from companies such as Vocalis aren't the same. Chris Hart, Wildfire's vice president and European managing director, said: "Orange uses Wildfire on clustered, Xeon-based Compaq servers that have many MIPS of processing power. They also use proprietary speech recognition software. It works." Wildfire - which is now easier to use than an earlier release - allows voice-activated dialling (VAD), voicemail navigation, and contact storing on voice-controlled databases. Orange even claims the dulcet-toned electronic assistant recognises various regional accents, and cuts down on call times. It's available for a one-off £10 connection fee. Vocalis technology allows users to interact with Web sites via telephones, and also does away with the need for trained call centre agents for certain simple functions such as balance enquiries. Such a system is already in use at Abbey National. Minesh Patel, technical director at Vocalis, said: "Speech recognition has had many false dawns, but now with the advent of newer RISC (reduced instruction set computer) processors, there are sufficiently powerful handsets available to work with the server-based technology. For some applications, you're going to have to have the processing in one [central] place, but we are now seeing cost savings and value added services." The Yankee Group research house reckons such services are the future. In a recent statement it said Orange is smart to differentiate itself in this way, following the lead of PacBell Wireless and Bell Canada in North America. (Bouygues Telecom in France will be Wildfire's next customer.) Such electronic assistant services will be used more and more as safety in cars becomes a higher-profile issue, and they become integrated with unified messaging platforms. Even fixed network operators will incorporate the technology, while handset manufacturers will do their best to make sure not all the intelligence is on the networks. Daniel Bieler, analyst at Ovum, says: "It's all about what we call creating a personal electronic space, whether you're using a mobile, fixed line phone or a PC. Our research shows it's very early days, but I believe this is the way forward for value-added services." However, he warns there are problems. For example, IVR (interactive voice response) systems from Vocalis and others can be a user turn-off if they aren't structured properly, and some noisy or multi-lingual environments don't suit phone-based speech recognition technology. But with other vendors - such as Intellivoice, Motorola and Lucent (working with Unisys) - ready to make an assault, this market will take off. As long as prices are reasonable and the technology keeps on improving, that's almost as big a certainty as the success of the latest Star Wars film.