The rayne in Spayne stays maynly on the playne?
Rating: by Jove, has Vlingo finally got it?
By Annie Turner
Vlingo’s beta version of its voice-based interface for mobiles is available today. For an online tour, go to http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/21/vlingo-voice-enable-any-mobile-application/ It’s fun.
The company was founded by Mike Phillips, formerly of Nuance, and Dave Grannan, former general manager at Nokia has joined recently. The thing I like about the site is the acknowledgement that accents wreak havoc on speech recognition systems (In our trials the system generally worked with my Californian accent. However, an Australian accent had very little luck.)
Vlingo has tackled this problem using a statistical language model to make the best guess about what you say. It improves on that by taking into account context, positive and negative feedback from the individual. Context helps: if an address is sought, the number of possible street names is limited by the place you are in. Each time the user corrects Vlingo it learns – for instance, correcting Austin to Boston.
None of this is new, though. Perhaps the differentiation is in the execution? Certainly the services in the demo are fun, from speaking to send an SMS (although who meets for dinner at 7?), to looking for a track and downloading it, to looking for location-based info. I’d love to see what it made of my marmelised Lancashire vowels – god knows, I struggle with them myself.
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