Vlingo: Voice Enable Any Mobile Application

People really hate cell phone keypads for data entry. Anyone who’s called customer service knows voice guided phone applications aren’t new, but they’re a good way to navigate menus and enter text. And applications like Spinvox which incorporated speech recognition to turn verbal voicemails into written text messages, and TellMe, which uses voice recognition to power local search, are useful and popular. Cambridge-based Vlingo wants to make voice enabling applications easier, by using their own speech-to-text J2ME/Brew application API (Windows/Symbian later this year). With the API, developers will be able translate a user’s voice to text, and use it in their application as if typed directly into the program. One of their first examples was for local search and shopping. Vlingo voice-enabled a text box on the program you could fill out by holding down the talk button and saying a phrase, like “Pizza in San Francisco”. The system then fills in the form with what you said, letting you modify the text normally if it gets it wrong. In our trials the system generally worked with my Californian accent. However, an Australian accent had very little luck, highlighting the difficulties of internationalizing speech recognition. Often speech recognition companies make their jobs easier by limiting the vocabulary or training the system on a comprehensive lexicon of words and accents. But due to the breadth of their effort, Vlingo had to take a more general approach, using machine learning through statistical analysis so the system could work in a wider array of uses.