Computers: Speech Technology

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When submitting your site please make sure that you do not confuse "voice recognition" with "speech recognition."

Technically "voice recognition" to the industry means speaker verification and identification, i.e., who is speaking - is it Alex or Jane?. Speech recognition is the identification of content - what did Alex say?

This category does not, therefore, take "speech recognition" to be synonymous with "voice recognition." Please make sure your site uses these terms properly before submitting your site.

Dictation equipment should go to Shopping/Office_Products/Equipment/.

This category tracks significant software/hardware advances, companies and sites in the area of speech processing, recognition and voice control for computers.

Speech recognition provides the ability for computers, cars, domestic utilities, etc to recognize what words a user is saying. For example a car may be able to recognize a driver saying “cd” to turn on the CD player, or “wipers” to turn on windscreen wipers. A word processor on a PC may be able to recognize what is said to and automatically type it into a document

Voice recognition is usually just used as another term for Speech Recognition. However occasionally it is used to mean a computer/device recognizing someone’s unique voice rather than what they are actually saying.

This category does not, therefore, take "speech recognition" to be synonymous with "voice recognition."

Hardware

This category is best for microphones, headsets, computer cards, racks and systems whose primary purpose is to recognize spoken word and turn them into text or interactive dialogs. Equipment which is "digital" but is primarily used to digitally record and playback voice for stenographic or transcription purposes is better placed in Shopping/Office_Products/Equipment/ or Business/Business_Services/Office_Services/General_Transcription_and_Word_Processing/ or possibly Health/Professions/Medical_Transcription/Services/.

This category is for hardware that is particular oriented to or needed for the computer recognition of speech or computer synthesis of speech.

Linux

Sites which are cross platform or for multiple OSs should be submitted to the Computers/Speech_Technology.

This category is for web sites featuring speech technology products, projects and research that is particularly directed towards Linux, Unix and/or open source but not portable to non Linux/Unix platforms.

Medical Transcription

Sites offering only manual (i.e. no computer speech recognition) medical transcription services should be listed in /Health/Professions/Medical Transcription.

Applying speech recognition technology to the task of transcribing medical records into computer processable format for the medical profession.

Research

This category contains speech recognition, voice recognition and text-to-speech research sites. There are no consumer products, resellers, tool kits here.

Resellers

This category is best for software or systems whose primary purpose is to recognize spoken word and turn them into text or interactive dialogs but which are made by bigger firms like IBM, Phillips, ScanSoft and then resold or repackaged by these sites. Speech dictation equipment which is "digital" but is primarily used to digitally record and playback voice for stenographic or transcription purposes is better placed in Shopping/Office_Products/Equipment/ or Business/Business_Services/Office_Services/General_Transcription_and_Word_Processing or possibly Health/Professions/Medical_Transcription/Services/.

A "reseller" is approximately a retail channel speech and voice recognition software products agency. They may additionally provide training or other tailoring services for these products. Typically they resell IBM or ScanSoft/Dragon PC based speech recognition products.

Speech Synthesis

This category groups together all types of text to speech programs which enable selective audio presentation of web pages from a web browsing session, e-mail or other PC desktop activity.

This category contains links for sites involved in speech synthesis, text to speech processing or vendors selling such things.

Telephony

This category is for telephony products, services and hardware that particularly use speech processing/recognition over telephone lines or wireless mobile. Call center products also included.
Long distance phone services products which use Internet as a part of the carrier path should submit to Computers/Internet/Telephony.
VOIP services should be submitted to Business/Telecommunications/Services/VoIP
Speech dictation equipment which is "digital" but is primarily used to digitally record and playback voice for stenographic or transcription purposes is better placed in Shopping/Office_Products/Equipment or Business/Business_Services/Office_Services/General_Transcription_and_Word_Processing/.

Category is for telephony products and services that particularly use speech processing/recognition over telephone lines or wireless mobile including IVR (interactive voice response) and call center processing.

Tool Kits

Links for developers of speech recognition, speech synthesis software. Focus is DLL's, libraries, components and building blocks for larger applications.

VoiceXML

This category is for products and services that do speech processing where the product design places an emphasis on the employment of VoiceXML markup programming language in controlling that processing.
If your site is fundamentally a speech product used in conjunction with the telephone/wireless, please submit to Computers/Speech_Technology/Telephony.

This category is for products and services that do speech processing where the product design places an emphasis on the employment of VoiceXML markup programming language in controlling that processing.

Voice Portals

Please submit only sites that use the Web as the main source of information to process voice requests and provide response via telephone or other spoken format.
Chat services and long distance telephone services go to Computers/Internet/Telephony.

A Voice Portal is a consumer or business application that accept user's speech input via a telephone or microphone, gathers the requested information from the Internet, and speaks it back over the telephone in either a computerized or recorded voice.