Sunday, June 27, 2010

Artificial Intelligence Technology and Speech Recognition Software


Link to June 25 New York Times article, "Computers Learn to Listen and Some Talk Back".  [Print headline:  "Machines, Not Apt in Chitchat, Make Strides in Using Speech".

Excerpt:   Yet if far from perfect, speech recognition software is good enough to be useful in more ways all the time. Take call centers. Today, voice software enables many calls to be automated entirely. And more advanced systems can understand even a perplexed, rambling customer with a misbehaving product well enough to route the caller to someone trained in that product, saving time and frustration for the customer. They can detect anger in a caller’s voice and respond accordingly — usually by routing the call to a manager.

So the outlook is uncertain for many of the estimated four million workers in American call centers or the nation’s 100,000 medical transcriptionists, whose jobs were already threatened by outsourcing abroad. “Basic work that can be automated is in the bull’s-eye of both technology and globalization, and the rise of artificial intelligence just magnifies that reality,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Retiring Guy is very fond is this Google mobile app.

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