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TIME MAGAZINE, JUNE 4, 2001, VOL.157 NO.22
Speak Up
Your computer is listening
By MICHELLE LEVANDER
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Red Dog Studio for TIME.
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Forget ringing cell phones. Last fall my younger brother introduced me to a new way to harass fellow passengers. On the ride in from Los Angeles International Airport, as he whizzed through traffic with my husband and me in tow, he suddenly began barking like a G-rated Tourette's sufferer: "Entertainment." Pause. "Restaurants." Pause. "Hollywood." Pause. Bleary-eyed from jet lag after our flight from Hong Kong, my husband and I exchanged confused glances. "Call!" Eric bellowed. The routine repeated itself until Eric pulled up at a trattoria moments before closing.
Over a tomato, basil and mozzarella salad, Eric shared the secret of his restaurant karma: a hands-free mobile phone and Tellme, a popular American voice-activated service that responds to defined voice prompts and provides free stock quotes, weather and entertainment guides to 35,000 U.S. cities. The speech recognition technology that Tellme employs isn't rocket science. But it is simple and effective.
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And it certainly works, which is more than can be said for a more ambitious speech recognition effort under way at an Intel research lab in Beijing. As a scientist reads from a Chinese newspaper into a microphone, the words appear magically on a computer screen. But when a friend sings the lyrics of a Chinese pop song, the technology fails miserably. Apparently the slang didn't fit its preprogrammed language bank. It gets even stickier when computers try to talk back to humans. Most speech recognition devices are "idiot savants," says William Weisel, an industry analyst based in southern California. "They can make them very clever on very narrow subjects. It's not artificial intelligence but embedded intelligence." In other words, it will be a while before computers can chat as well as my brother—when he was three.
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