VoIP Now: Crystal Gazing - VoIP Voice-from+to-Text Applications

July 25, 2006

Crystal Gazing - VoIP Voice-from+to-Text Applications

Marshall Sponder at WebMetricsGuru talked about a colleague of his, Bill Tancer, who injured himself in a cycling accident, temporarily being unable to write for his website. Tancer turned to Dragon Naturally Speaking software as an alternative, which worked out fine. Now of course, this isn't VoIP software, but it got me to thinking. If voice recognition software has come along far enough, it could be harnessed into VoIP-to-text applications. The same goes for voice translation software to create text-to-VoIP applications.

For example, Asterisk is offering MailCall, a free email-to-VoIP application. It reads your email to you over Asterisk-based VoIP phone, and works POP3 and IMAP accounts for numerous web-based and standalone email clients. Imagine the fun listening to your spam email. Psychologists will have a field day studying the effects. On the positive side, text-to-voice could be coupled with voice-to-text to build a VoIP system for users who are hearing-impaired. Such a VoIP-based system would replace the expensive human-generated voice-to-text systems that piggyback PSTN phones.

So far, these examples are for human-to-human interaction. VoIP applications could be used to control the ubiquitous VoIP-controlled SEDs (Service Enabled Devices) that'll be appearing any time now. If you in fact did have a wired home, you could potentially VoIP home to your private web server and control SED appliances, such as the sprinkler. I've said that before, but I didn't think about voice recognition software as part of the bridge for being able to talk to appliances and control them.

Of course, you'd have to use a fairly limited grammar, and have a suitable processor. There are already markup language grammars such as VoiceXML for telephone system menus, but as far as I know, there's nothing for ordering around SEDs. If someone devised a command language wrapped up in XML and made it open source and extensible, in a few years, we might all be talking to our appliances with ease. Dare I say, the same language could be used to ask robot maids to make scrambled eggs in the morning?

Failing a George Jetson existence, if you're interested in building Skype apps, check out the Skype API Intro page, complete with a video. Be an early adapter and be one of the first to start building VoIP-controlled web services. I think voiceWeb/ VoIPWeb will form the next wave after web 2.0.

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July 25, 2006 in Services, Skype, Software | Permalink