Speech Recognition For Handhelds

Living in the city, we have a lot of interesting folks wandering around. Some, like the guy downtown who paints himself silver and stands like a statue for hours, are harmless and amusing. In the case of other, more surly characters, common sense just tells you that it might be best to walk on the opposite side of the street. It used to be that if you heard someone having a heated conversation with an invisible adversary, they probably fell into the latter category, but nowadays, every other suit downtown is walking around apparently talking to themselves because they are using a hands-free device on their cell phone. While it's probably safer to use an earpiece to avoid the potential and oft-told radiation brain damage that cell phones can cause, it's a little disconcerting to be sitting on the bus listening to one half of a business deal. Well, Voice Signal Technologies has just introduced another type of technology that will make it difficult for us to tell the suits from the nuts: a real-time, large-vocabulary, speech recognition solution capable of running on a PDA or cell phone. Code-named E.L.V.I.S., (Embedded Large Vocabulary Interface System), the platform enables mobile device users to create and send email or SMS messages by talking to their handheld device. The E.L.V.I.S. platform has a vocabulary of several thousand words (customizable by the user), and is supposed to improve in accuracy as it adapts to the voice of an individual speaker. The E.L.V.I.S. platform is expected to be available in Q4 2001. As an aside, a few weeks ago, I saw some poor soul sitting on a sidewalk who was trying to contain the noises and profanities that were spewing uncontrollably out of his mouth. This woman who was walking by suddenly jumped aside when one of the guy's outbursts caught her off guard at which point he grumbled, "What's the matter with you, I'm talking on my cell phone." Errr, he wasn't, but humor is always a sign of the times.