speech recognition

To improve accessibility for the hearing impaired, YouTube on Thursday rolled out auto-captioning for all users. The video site initiated the project in 2008 and opened it up to a small group of users last November.

An Android is targeting Apple's iPhone. Verizon Wireless has begun running ads comparing the iPhone to its upcoming Droid, a Motorola-made phone based on Google's Android 2.0 open-source operating system.

"iDon't have a real keyboard," the ad says, touting other "iDon't" feature shortcomings of the iPhone. The ad, which ran on TV this past weekend, ends with what may be the Droid's tagline: "Everything iDon't ... Droid Does."

First Android From Verizon

An Android is targeting Apple's iPhone. Verizon Wireless has begun running ads comparing the iPhone to its upcoming Droid, a Motorola-made phone based on Google's Android 2.0 open-source operating system.

"iDon't have a real keyboard," the ad says, touting other "iDon't" feature shortcomings of the iPhone. The ad, which ran on TV this past weekend, ends with what may be the Droid's tagline: "Everything iDon't ... Droid Does."

First Android From Verizon

Internet search giant Google has released the Android 1.5 SDK for Android developer phones. Android 1.5 -- referred to by developers as the Cupcake update -- is available only for the Android Dev Phone 1 and is based on the Cupcake branch from the Android Open Source Project.

HTC, manufacturer of the G1, has made available new system images for users to upgrade the Android Dev Phone 1 to Android 1.5.

Google is pushing its voice-recognition technology to Apple's iPhone first, before devices running its own Android mobile platform.

The New York Times offered photographs of Google employees Vic Gundotra and Gummi Hafsteinsoon using an iPhone for a voice search. The free application was expected to be available on Apple's App Store on Friday. Google reportedly will soon offer the technology for other devices, presumably including the T-Mobile G1, which uses Android.

Microsoft Corp. expects its Beijing research center to start producing breakthroughs that could lead to global products in health care and other areas, the software giant's chief research officer said Wednesday as the center marked its 10th anniversary.

Microsoft is part of a wave of companies that are expanding research and development in China to serve its fast-growing market and take advantage of a huge Chinese talent pool of scientists and engineers.

Speech recognition applications are not such revolutionizing IVR, defined for this article as enabling dual-tone multiplex frequency (DTMF) or TouchTone(TM) interactions, but instead appears to be supplanting it as the key means of automated voice interaction. That victory, which may be in sight, sets the stage for integrating voice with web, e-mail, and SMS to provide a unified user-friendly automated solution that will reduce agent engagement time and, for an increasing number but far from all interactions, eliminate agent involvement.

There aren't too many good-news stories coming out of Iraq, but here's one. The U.S. military is bridging the communications gap between its soldiers and Iraqis by tapping some innovative speech recognition technology from IBM Research. Using a laptop computer or PDA, soldiers speak into a microphone and the software translates what they say in English into Arabic. Iraqi soldiers or civilians see and hear the words in Arabic, and their answers are immediately translated into English. About 10,000 of these systems are in use in the battle zone.