As voice-control companies work to take control of the computer away from the keyboard, one sizeable barrier remains: people still are not comfortable talking to technology.
Speech-recognition and voice-control have come a long way in the past year, but even their most ardent proponents admit to psychological hurdles. At the recent Speech'TEK 99 conference in New York, much of the talk centred on why talking to computers remains uncomfortable for many users. The issue is critical in the light of recently released sales figures.
US unit sales for programs that let users dictate documents and control some PC functions, actually dropped 0.3 per cent over the past year to around 500,000 units, according to the research company PC Data. Roger Lanctot, the company's research director, said: "We're still in the novelty phase. We're probably a year or two away from it becoming something that's included with almost everything."
"There is a real reluctance to speak to a computer," said Bill Scholz, of the natural language understanding division of Unisys. "It will dwindle over time but only as speech applications get better."
Unisys announced a partnership with Motorola to work on Internet voice applications, which Scholz described as the market's great new hope. Similarly, IBM announced a partnership at Speech'TEK with Nokia to work on mobile speech control research and development. Key to IBM's efforts is looking beyond the luxury of voice control to functions that address physical handicaps and offer significant work efficiencies, executives said.
At the show IBM demonstrated a system that read out the full content of a Web page. (Existing systems already allow users to navigate the Web using voice.) Separately, IBM showed a voice-operable soft drinks machine that dispensed drinks on verbal cue. It is not, however, expected to be widely available any time soon.
Anne-Marie Derouault, of IBM Speech Systems, said consumers are beginning to understand the enabling power of voice control - namely that "you can do more, quicker. It will absolutely reach mass acceptance. If the need is there, people get accustomed very quickly."
In addition to the psychological, other obstacles to mass acceptance have included unreliable translators and systems that require lengthy training sessions to optimise recognition. Mark Skurnick, of Dragon Systems, which launched the market nine years ago, said the newest version of his company's Naturally Speaking software requires five minutes of training and has a 95 per cent-plus accurate translation rate. Still, he noted, acceptance by the vast majority of home PC users isn't there yet, perhaps because of outdated expectations. There is, he said, a "perception that the technology is not quite there yet. But now it's ready for prime time. People have to get used to the fact that they don't have to use the keyboard to use the PC."
Dragon expects the year 2000 to be the breakthrough year, he said.