----- Original Message -----
From: "Justin Philips" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 2:07 PM
Subject: Voice-enabling web news
VOICE-ENABLING WEB NEWS
(GERMANY) -- The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) has
become the first German daily newspaper to launch a voice portal, a
Web site that accepts verbal input and produces text-to-speech output.
Its Fonservice recognizes spoken words like "news" or "traffic" and
leads surfers to the appropriate content, which is then translated
into synthetic speech using ScanSoft's RealSpeak. Fonservice visitors
can also issue voice commands like "repeat," "forward" and "back."
FAZ, one of Germany's top four national papers, serves a large segment
of wealthy and mobile business users, upon whom it is counting for
early adoption that will bankroll Fonservice's continued development.
Still a future dream, however, is a portal that can offer the whole
Web via voice, rather than just a "walled garden" of information at a
particular site. "Compared to the PC market, telephony is still in the
era of the DOS prompt," said Dan Ridsdale, an analyst with UK market
consultants Ovum. He thinks that technology in speech recognition has
improved to the point that media companies had better begin claiming a
stake in the game: "Personal assistant service providers will
effectively own the customer interface, becoming the users' personal
portal into the network." (Euromap Newsletter 9 Jan. 2003)
http://www.hltcentral.org/page-900.0.shtml#SuccessStory1 Related
story: Voice Portals (HLTCentral 9 Mar. 2002)
http://www.hltcentral.org/htmlengine.shtml?id=883
Just an email away......
Justin
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