IBM Wants You to Talk to Your Devices

"Dubbed the "Super Human Speech Recognition Initiative," IBM's push aims to create new technology that supports what IBM Voice Systems Director Nigel Beck calls "conversational computing."

The Super Human Speech Recognition Initiative's ultimate goal is to create technology that performs better than humans for any transcription task, without the need for customization. It seeks accurate transcription of everything from voice mail to meetings and customer service calls -- with full audio (and possibly) video searching capabilities. Along the way, the company plans a number of milestones that it expects will have wide-ranging applications in everything from data mining in call centers to interpersonal communication to biometrics....

'The state of the speech world is roughly where the state of the Web world was six years ago,' Beck said....

To that end, working with partners Motorola and Opera, IBM has submitted a specification for Multimodal Access to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The specification, XHTML+VoiceXML, would allow users to access data on devices through multiple modes of interaction.

'Multimodal is the mixing of voice and data," Beck said. "People operate in multiple modes at once....'

The company has also put together a number of prototypes to display its ideas.

One, Meeting Miner, is an agent used during meetings to passively capture and analyze meeting discussion. It also has the capability of becoming an active participant in the meeting when it finds information it determines to be pertinent to the discussion. Meeting Miner uses the audio streams from one or more microphones to capture the speech during the meeting and converts it to a text transcript." [allNetDevices Wireless News]

"Salomon Smith Barney, J.P. Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse First Boston, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and UBS Warburg have begun using the Communicator Hub IM service, creator Communicator announced Monday. The companies have each signed multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts to license the service for their employees and institutional clients, said Leo Schlinkert, chief executive of Communicator.

'Companies are being besieged by their employees who want instant messaging to communicate with their fellow employees and, more importantly, with their customers and partners,' Schlinkert said in a statement. White Plains, N.Y.-based Communicator has a small investment in SecuritiesHub, a consortium owned by the eight financial services companies that signed up for the service Monday....

The Hub IM also allows companies to tailor the material transmitted and have greater control over the information. For example, a mutual fund company could use the service to contact both J.P. Morgan Chase and Merrill Lynch, but neither of the financial services companies would be able to tell by the information that they had the same client. It also allows a company to have a common address book rather than requiring employees to create their own unique "buddy lists," and it gives the company more control over archives of IM conversations." [CNET News.com]

I hope public libraries start taking IM seriously, too.

Speaking of NetGens, Classrooms Need Upgrades, Too

"Schools have made progress integrating computers and PDAs into the classroom, yet one design firm believes that more drastic changes are needed, so they created a prototype of what a future classroom may look like....

The three-part technology system consists of an interactive PDA called the GooBall, a backpack and a removable flexible LCD screen for each student. Students can sit, stand or lie down when using the devices, and are not confined to desks....

The GooBall is an interactive communication device containing six layers of learning software. The device monitors a student's heart rate and body temperature with a bioread function and uses GPS to track where they are. It includes instant messaging and a compass, watch, and topic-specific alert system that directs a student to relevant articles and books about whatever they are studying. Students can choose an animal icon to represent their personality.

The backpack houses the main power supply for the system and holds any personal items. The pocket keeps items locked tight with a fingerprint security zipper. The portable flexible screen functions like a laptop, providing wireless Internet access and streaming video. It has a touch-screen interface....

'I can't see where people are willing to put more money into advanced ideas when there are some really basic things that people aren't willing to pay for,' said Rozanna Bejin, a seventh-grade English teacher at DeLong Middle School in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. 'There's just no money for schools. We have to have referendums for people to make the payrolls and fix the roofs on the buildings.' " [Wired News]

I don't believe something like this will come to pass any time soon, but imagine if it ever does. How would the school library ever fit into this model if they're still stuck circulating physical materials because the law (DMCA + CBDTPA) has moved to a point where it prevents an exemption for libraries to circulate digital ones.

IPod: Music to Hackers' Ears

"Jean-Olivier Lanctôt-David is a 14-year-old hacker who has figured out a way to display online news headlines on Apple's iPod digital music player.

Lanctôt-David, who has been using Macs since he was 4 and programming since he was 11, was given an iPod for Christmas and immediately wanted to make it do more than just play music.

So he whipped up PodNews, a program that fetches headlines from the Web in XML format and displays them on the iPod's small screen.

In the last few months, hackers have figured out clever ways to store not only names and addresses on the iPod but calendar items, song lyrics and even phrases in foreign languages.

The iPod, which must be the hottest gadget on the planet, has also been made to work with Windows. It's supposed to be Mac-only, but EphPod is a free program that allows iPods to connect to Windows machines; Mediafour's Xplay, currently in beta, is a commercial program that does the same thing....

Michael Zapp, an instructor at the University of Manitoba in Canada, has created a pair of AppleScript applications that take data from Microsoft's Entourage (the Macintosh version of Outlook) and transforms it into vCard file format, which can be displayed using the iPod's new contacts feature." [Wired News]

This is the kind of impact the NetGens will have on our culture in the future. If you think we're recycling old ideas and morphing them into something new now (hip hop, the movie Moulin Rouge, any animated Disney movie), then just wait. These kids are much more computer-literate and they're much more prone to interact directly with their environment.

Everything is two-way for them, whereas most of us are still stuck in one-way. For them television, radio, the internet, books, music - they're all something from which to get entertainment or information, but they also expect to give back to them, too. Sometimes this is in the form of filtering what is coming out (digital video recorders, recommendation engines), sometimes it's global discussions (online discussions, instant messaging instead of email), and sometimes it's creating new distribution channels from old ones in order to do what they want to do (Apple iPod, Gameboys with ebooks on them).

Whatever you give or sell them, they're going to expect to make it do what they want. Letting them go to town on iPods is an excellent strategy by Apple, although this isn't anything new for them. Apple understands these kids extremely well. They could try to put a halt to all of this hacking using the DMCA and other laws, but by letting folks hack it instead, they're letting the community take the iPod to new heights.

This is the point the entertainment industry is missing. Instead of realizing the vast potential of customers who would interact directly with their product to do even more with it (all the while paying for this privilege), they want to lock out the very people that will innovate them to new levels.

I also wanted to highlight this article because I still want to figure out how to automatically generate vCards for events in the SLS Calendar. If you come across anyone doing this (especially if they're using Oracle or Microsoft Access), please let me know!