Dragon Dictates Its Last Message

Desktop Sales Soft

For years, the market for continuous speech dictation has been flat and has drawn little consumer interest. In fact, Philips pulled its FreeSpeech voice dictation program off retail shelves last year because of lackluster sales, says Rick Gallahn, director of Philips Speech Processing in North America. Philips stills sells FreeSpeech software on its Web site and in Europe.

"Speech recognition continues to have a long, hard slog on the desktop," says Jackie Fenn, an analyst with the research firm Gartner. "And it's not because of any shortcomings in the technology." She says old typing habits die hard for desktop PC users uncomfortable navigating their PCs with voice.

The real future for speech on the consumer desktop isn't with continuous natural language dictation, Fenn says. Rather, she contends the technology's promise lies in command and control of applications and services. This kind of approach would let you say, "Computer, please dictate an e-mail message to my brother and send it to him." But speech recognition developers must shift away from dictation technology and move toward natural language understanding.

Hearing Future Speak

The popularity of the Internet and surging use of mobile phones has reignited interest in speech technology--just not on the desktop, industry analysts say. New speech applications like voice portals, which let you access weather, movie times, and sports scores through voice commands, have given speech technologies a jump-start.

Lernout & Hauspie has licensed its core speech technology for use in popular services such as Tellme and BeVocal. Both let you access Internet information over any phone.

Both L&H and IBM have announced plans to speech-enable personal digital assistants, as well. Philips says it will speech-enable everything from television sets and fax machines to mobile phones.

The market has expanded to make room for new competition. Speech newcomers SpeechWorks and Nuance Communication have thrived offering purely telephone-based voice recognition products. For example, SpeechWorks lets you use your voice to trade stocks with ETrade, track Federal Express packages, and get flight information from United Airlines.

Analyst forecasts in the early 1980s expected desktop voice recognition technology to be huge. Prognosticators said it would be the primary way people interacted with complicated operating systems and applications. Today, voice recognition on the desktop accounts for less than 10 percent of the speech market, says Amy Wohl, president of Wohl Associates. Clearly, we're still waiting for something to shout about.