Friday, January 25, 2013

Sorting out voice technologies

On the occasion of Amazon's purchase of Ivona, The Verge has a good article sorting out various voice technologies.

 Key bit:
  • Text-to-speech: reads text that's already been written into something approaching a human-sounding voice (Ivona, AT&T, Microsoft, many others);
  • Speech-to-text: transcribes what you say word-for-word into text (Dragon, Yap);
  • Voice recognition: biometric that knows who you are based on your voice (like in Sneakers);
  • Natural-language AI: transcribes speech and/or parses text, looking for keywords and structure to turn ordinary sentences into computer queries (Siri's core technology).
  • Those interested in voice tech should click through.