Voice-Activated Search for People with Visual Disabilities
Published: Jun 24, 2007
Google was granted on April 11 a patent for technology that would allow users to enter search queries by talking rather than typing. Speech-to-text tools are not new, but products that help people with visual disabilities to surf the Internet were not very common.
“The difficulty has been that human speech has layers of meaning, plus, in some ways, the computer has to be dumb enough to understand anybody, to cut down on programming it for just one person’s voice,” said Mike Calvo, chief executive of Serotek, a company that develops products for people with a visual disability.
The patent covers a “voice interface for a search engine” and is described as a system providing search results from a voice-based query. This new technology enables a person to initiate a Google search through a computer’s microphone. In addition to being a boon for people with visual impairment, a voice-activated tool would be ideal for mobile services.
Though human conversation is complex, identifying individual words is quite easy for computers at this point. Calvo, who is visually impaired, says, “Recognizing words is a piece of cake; it’s conversation flow that’s tough.”
Alexander Franz and Brian Milch, the two Google employees named on the patent, noted that Web search has several properties that make it a “particularly difficult speech-recognition problem.”
The most common problem is translating the spoken search queries and creating a large enough vocabulary database to accommodate most requests. Also, the ability to do voice recognition in real time was a cause of concern.
Source: Sci-tech today
