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IBM overhauls voice-recognition strategy
By Joe Wilcox
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
June 21, 2000, 9:01 p.m. PT
IBM tomorrow will completely revamp its voice-recognition technology strategy, focusing more on delivering core technologies than on individual products.
The shift recognizes that computing is increasingly moving to smaller devices, such as handheld computers, cell phones and wearable PCs, that demand voice-recognition capabilities. IBM is also betting there will be big demand for voice-recognition server software essential for other devices, such as set-top boxes and in-vehicle Web appliances.
Motorola is also using IBM Embedded ViaVoice(TM) Multiplatform Edition for voice recognition and text-to-speech capabilities. IBM's ViaVoice enables drivers to use voice commands, as an alternative input to faceplate controls, for accessing information such as weather, news and sports, select a favorite radio station or other iRadio system applications.
``The iRadio system is helping automakers bring a whole new class of innovative safety, security, convenience and entertainment features to drivers and passengers,'' said Marios Zenios, corporate vice president and general manager, Motorola Telematics Communications Group. ``The combination of Motorola's engineering integration capabilities and IBM's innovative software solutions and technology will help to shape a product that dramatically changes the concept of the car radio.''
``By using IBM's ViaVoice and VisualAge software the Motorola iRadio system will have tremendous flexibility and functionality -- two attributes that will help make iRadio a winner in the Telematics marketplace,'' said Friedrich Christeiner, IBM general manager, automotive industry. ``It's a pleasure for IBM to join with Motorola in offering auto makers and their customers an exciting new kind of driving experience.
IBM Does Voice PDAs
~Maximum PC
URL: http://www.maximumpc.com/content/2000/03/07/10941
At the Mobile Insights conference, IBM demoed an embedded version of its ViaVoice speech engine in a Palm Pilot. The new innovation promises to alleviate palm-type devices with limited keyboard support by giving users voice options, instead.
The demonstration showed a Palm III outfitted with IBM's Personal Speech Assistant (PSA) prototype. The PSA was attached to the back of the Palm III as an add-on highlighting the ViaVoice speech recognition and text-to-speech technology.
IBM maintains it will not provide the hardware for the PSA but will license an embedded speech SDK for developers on any platform. The SDK includes recognition for 500 words, enough for functionality.
The SDK, now in beta, will ship by the end of the second quarter this year. IBM remains silent on who it is working with to bring the technology to you but a car with the technology was being shown off at the conference.
IBM teaches the Net to speak
Reuters
June 22, 2000 5:14 AM PT
NEW YORK -- IBM Corp. said Thursday it is launching a fleet of products to bring voice to the Internet.
The products, most of which are already available, will allow users to surf the Internet using a telephone instead of a screen and a voice instead of a mouse and keyboard.
IBM (NYSE: IBM), of Armonk, N.Y., the world's largest computer company and second largest software maker after Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), said it would incorporate VoiceXML -- Extensible Markup Language -- into its WebSphere server technology that has traditionally managed all transactions and movements on a Web page. In this way, the new technology will add a layer that allows Internet activity to go from the graphics displayed on a screen to be conducted using a voice on a phone, be it wireless or standard wired telephones.
"Instead of using a Web browser, you're using a voice browser," said W.S. Osborne, general manager of IBM Voice Systems.
Osborne said that in addition to providing the technology that will allow users to get stock quotes, buy merchandise, find out what movie is playing and buy a ticket all via the phone Internet, the voice technology will allow telecommunications companies to build portals where users can get news, horoscopes and other information over the Internet by talking into the phone.
New concept in voice technology The new-standard VoiceXML tells a computer what to do with a command. It was developed by Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT), Lucent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: LU) and AT&T Corp. (NYSE: T) and is unlike proprietary voice recognition systems. The systems will open up the technology to a large pool of developers, who can create different applications for speech-controlled Internet activity, said Steve McClure, a research vice president with International Data Corp.
Voice-enabled Internet technology is seen as fertile ground because more people have access to cellular phones than to computers. Research group Cahners-In-Stat Group estimated that by the end of 2002 worldwide wireless subscribers will reach the 1 billion mark with penetration rates approaching 17 percent. The number of subscribers is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 34.5 percent over the next five years, the firm said.
There are about 550 million regular personal computer users.
Wireless handsets will be the most pervasive method of accessing the Internet within the next four years, Cahners said.
However, such devices, which include personal digital assistants and cellular phones, will make navigation using a screen and buttons or keys cumbersome.
"There's a proliferation of new devices," said McClure. "The future of the computer industry is not necessarily on the desktop. Accessing information from a number of smaller devices, unless you like to type with toothpicks and you're under 30, you're going to use a more natural interface."
Playing field getting crowded The forecast of demand has grabbed the attention of other voice recognition and speech development companies, such as Philips Electronics, SpeechWorks International Inc., Nuance Communications Inc. and Locus Dialogue Inc.
"What sets it apart is WebSphere and the ability for people working with WebSphere to take advantage of this," McClure said.
The combination of WebSphere and IBM's ViaVoice technology will allow speech Web transactions over the phone. It will run on Microsoft's Windows NT and be out by the fall. Other products already available include one that allows users to dictate and read documents using natural human speech on the Linux computer operating system, an alternative to Microsoft's Windows. Another allows users to interact with the Internet on systems using IBM's AIX operating system.
IBM's embedded ViaVoice will enable other devices, such as cars and telephones themselves, to take voice commands. Its CallPath Enterprise Foundation will operate with Siebel Systems Inc., which makes customer service software that runs call centers.
IBM, Nokia ally on voice-enabled mobile devices
By Margaret Quan
EE Times
(10/29/99, 2:57 p.m. EST)
NEW YORK — IBM Corp. and Nokia, the mobile phone giant, announced an agreement this week to collaborate on long-term research and development of speech interfaces and speech-recognition technology for mobile devices.
In addition, Nokia said it will participate in the development of the VoiceXML programming language standard.
The IBM-Nokia agreement extends an agreement between the companies announced earlier this month at Telecom 99 involving the promotion of the mobile Internet and a collaboration on wireless application protocol (WAP) solutions. WAP is a global standard that allows mobile devices to connect to the Internet.
Like the companies' earlier WAP pact, the speech collaboration effort is designed to move a mobile Internet forward. It may also lead to better speech interfaces for numerous devices in the long term, because Nokia, with its strong position in communications platforms, has already tackled the challenge of noisy environments for mobile systems. Allowing consumers to access information in natural conversational language will be key to enabling next-generation portable devices, the company said.
"Nokia is committed to useability and user-friendly access and we see the voice interface as a complementary element to simplify user interfaces," said Petri Haavisto, director of Nokia's speech and audio labs, which operates from Tampere, Finland.
Haavisto said speech interfaces are especially useful in situations where eyes and hands are busy, displays are inconvenient, or users need a quick shortcut to access information.
Speech-recognition technology is part of Nokia and IBM's vision of the mobile Internet, and both companies see its possible application across a range of products.
"We both foresee where the business is going — that speech will be an integral part of mobile products," said W.S. "Ozzie" Osborne, general manager of IBM's Speech and Pen Systems (West Palm Beach, Fla.). "And we believe we'll be able to satisfy that faster by working together."
Under their joint development agreement, speech researchers at IBM will work with Nokia researchers on speech interfaces for mobile devices, and will research multi-modal Internet browsing and other speech-enabled applications. Nokia's Haavisto declined to say when devices using IBM speech technology would be available, but described the types of devices Nokia will design.
"One of the trends we see is mobile devices that will have such a natural speech interface that the user won't be able to tell whether the speech technology is in the device or in the network," he said. "We expect to see VoiceXML implemented in the network. That's why Nokia is interested in VoiceXML."
The agreement gives Nokia access to IBM's speech technology portfolio, including the ViaVoice Millennium desktop dictation engine; directory dialer, natural language technology and a voice recognition engine for telephones; smaller speech engines for embedded products such as cells phones and cars; and a voice-enabled Internet browser.
Nokia has already licensed IBM's ViaVoice Directory Dialer, a voice dialer technology now used in Nokia's corporate network and available for licensing to Nokia customers.
Nokia has made its own forays into speech technology. Company researchers have developed speech-recognition technologies and well as speech coding and other techniques for manipulating speech in noisy environments, Haavisto said. This technology has been used to implement voice dialing in several small handsets for GSM and for Japan's mobile phone system.
But Nokia wants to go beyond voice dialing and voice control to create a more natural conversational speech interface for its mobile communication devices, Haavisto said. Nokia believes IBM's portfolio of speech technologies and expertise in natural language interfaces will support this goal, and help Nokia "deliver the Web in your pocket," said Haavisto.
In the belief that speech technology will be critical to next-generation mobile devices, Haavisto said Nokia is lending its support to the VoiceXML Forum, which is designing a voice programming language standard. Nokia will work with forum cofounders IBM, AT&T, Lucent Technologies and Motorola on the effort.
"Voice is an additional access method and we believe whether it will happen will depend on the development of open standards," said Haavisto. "We want to influence VoiceXML so that it is compatible with mobile Internet and mobile communications."
The VoiceXML Forum recently released its 0.9 specification for comment, and expects to receive approval for the spec from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in the first quarter of 2000.
At the announcement of its agreement with Nokia this week, IBM demonstrated a speech-enabled Web browser that uses the VoiceXML 0.9 specification. The browser, which can be download for free from the IBM Web site, uses IBM's ViaVoice Millennium speech engine, Websphere application server for e-commerce, interactive voice response and other IBM speech technologies.
The browser will be licensed to various IBM partners and will be available to developers wishing to write applications to it. IBM also plans to license the technology to other OEMs, Osborne said.
VoiceTimes spec
In addition to the Nokia pact, IBM announced that the Voice Technology Initiative for Mobile Enterprise Solutions (VoiceTimes) has released its first specification for the design of digital recording and mobile devices that use deferred speech recognition. The specification provides developers a standard interface for implementing voice in mobile enterprise environments.
The VoiceTimes specification includes audio hardware and signal specifications, a microphone, analog signal processing, a codec, audio signal processing, digital data compression, restored pulse code modulation and electromagnetic interference.
The VoiceTimes initiative, announced in April 1999, intends to have products incorporating the spec available by the end of 1999. Participants in the initiative include IBM, E Digital, Intel), Philips, Olympus, Dictaphone Corp. and Norcom Electronics Corp.
IBM unveils salvo of voice-based products for e-biz
By Yap Cheng Theng
Monday, June 26 2000
KUALA LUMPUR--In an effort to propel the use of voice technology for the mobile Internet market, IBM today unveiled seven new voice technology products, including IBM WebSphere Voice Server with ViaVoice Technology.
Strategic relationships with industry leaders Siebel, General Magic and Luminant were also announced to provide the infrastructure for the voice technology market, estimated to reach US$120 billion worldwide by 2006.
"With this announcement, IBM offers a compelling software platform for voice enabling e-business using leading edge call center and Web technology," said W.S. (Ozzie) Osborne, general manager, IBM Voice Systems in a statement.
The voice platform includes new, open standards-based, scalable products for the mobile device, Web application server, call center and Linux marketplaces.
As they come with ViaVoice Technology, the natural speech solution for eneterprise use, these products would be integrating the ease-of-use of natural speech with the convenience of the mobile Internet at the low transaction costs associated with the Web.
Available now, these products include IBM WebSphere Voice Server to deliver voice applications based on industry standard VoiceXML. It also helps businesses leverage their investments in Web and call center technologies to deliver e-business solutions.
VoiceXML complements today's Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) to allow the delivery of voice applications for the mobile Internet
WebSphere Voice Server will be made available on multiple environments, starting with the IBM DirectTalk call center platform as well as the first voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) implementation for the Web.
The other products launched today include:
• IBM ViaVoice Dictation for Linux which will be available through Shop IBM;
• IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Multiplatform Edition, a Java-standards compliant toolkit that provides developers with resources to create speech-enabled mobile solutions on any mobile device;
• IBM CallPath Enterprise Foundation, V6.3 which integrates Siebel Systems e-business applications in both the telephony and Web arenas;
• IBM DirectTalk Speech Recognition for AIX that enables callers to speak requests to interact with an application such as making business transactions over the phone;
• IBM DirectTalk Text-to-Speech for AIX that converts text into speech in the call center environment, eliminating the need for pre-recorded prompts; and
• IBM DirectTalk Beans for Java which allows call center applications to be constructed in open standards-based Java environment used for building Web applications.
IBM Guides Partners Into a Mobile Future
IBM's voice recognition, custom wireless shopping, and data conversion tools will power partners' end products.
Tom Spring, PCWorld.com
Tuesday, February 27, 2001
ATLANTA -- You may use some of IBM's most interesting technology without realizing where it comes from. Voice recognition, wireless communications, and some invisible middleware that connects disparate applications are likely to appear in products marketed in the coming months by IBM partners, who are checking out the selection here at the annual IBM PartnerWorld 2001 confab.
IBM may seem like a monolith, but it's humbly willing to let its partners promote its software, services, and hardware under their own names. After all, IBM allies were responsible for a third of its $88 billion in revenues last year, according to Lou Gerstner, IBM chair and chief executive officer.
Talk to Your PDA
Some of the most interesting offerings come from the mobile and wireless fronts, such as a conversion tool made by IBM's WebSphere division. This trans-coding service can turn Web pages on the fly into a format readable by a Palm handheld, a pager, or a mobile phone with a microbrowser. A similar service lets you make a spoken request for information, such as a stock quote or driving directions, using a mobile phone; a wireless service returns a text reply to the device of your choice.
An embedded version of IBM's voice recognition software ViaVoice is being steered toward mobile devices. IBM is suggesting that embedded ViaVoice be used to voice-enable personal digital assistants. You need only bark orders at your Palm or your mobile phone to get access to PDA staples like an address book, a calendar, or a date book. The version on display here recognizes 500 words and works in unison with a "sled" that snaps on to the back of a Palm III.
Another service, aimed at helping you keep your eyes on the road when driving, is the IBM Voice Dialer System. IBM uses this technology in-house today. Employees call a toll-free phone number and simply say the name of an IBM colleague, and the dialer system connects the call.
Modified E-Shopping Tested
Already in use in the United Kingdom is an IBM system sure to be a hit with the coupon-clipping crowd. IBM and the Safeway grocery store's British operations are field-testing a new shopping technology that lets shoppers order groceries from the comfort of their homes.
Using a loyalty card to profile shopping habits, Safeway compiles a list of groceries that shoppers are likely to want. It delivers that list wirelessly to a Palm device. The same Palm is also equipped with a barcode scanner for scanning and identifying items that have a universal product code.
Next, consumers page through the list, checking what they want. Then they upload the list to the Safeway computer system, with a credit card number for payment. When shoppers visit the store, they're met with the groceries bagged and ready to take home.
IBM Offers Partners a Share
Although most of the consumer products that use such emerging technologies will bear a name other than IBM, Big Blue is working at the back end as well, tying the technologies to a host of IBM infrastructure servers and software. It sees the proliferation of wireless and handheld devices as a huge new market, as desktop computer sales flatten. IBM's focus on middleware, as well as "integration and infrastructure," feeds both itself and its partners.
And IBM is putting its money where its vision is. Gerstner told partners here that IBM will invest $4 billion in helping its business partners, most importantly service providers, to build that infrastructure and its resources.
12/26/2000
Irving company develops voice-activated car safety systems
By Terry Box / The Dallas Morning News
As Scott Gee glided along Freeport Parkway recently in a silver Mercedes-Benz C240, he reached for a red button on a small overhead console.
"How's the weather?" he asked, speaking in the direction of a quarter-sized microphone in the console.
A female voice, sounding decidedly more human than the disembodied techno-drone on 24-hour weather stations, first asked Mr. Gee which city he wanted. "She" then gave him the current conditions and forecast for Dallas.
When ATX Technologies Inc. completes its new telematics system next year, it will be able to provide "real-time" traffic reports, directions to most anywhere on a map, stock quotes, emergency assistance and access to the Internet -- all through voice activation, the company says.
"We even anticipate its being able to read you your e-mails," said Mr. Gee, director of project management and infrastructure at Irving-based ATX.
ATX is one of at least five companies striving to quickly develop voice-activated systems, and many believe that is the direction that the entire telematics sector is headed. With the growing debate over driver distraction and cell phone use in cars, most new telematics systems will probably have to be "hands-off" units, industry observers say.
These products "are coming along at a great time," said Gary Wallace, executive director of external affairs at ATX. "At least one county [Suffolk County, N.Y.] has already banned cell phones while driving, and lots of municipalities are looking at it."
Even if the use of cell phones in cars is still permitted in the future, automakers have said that they are not interested in including new electronic devices on their vehicles that contribute to driver distraction, some analysts noted.
"It is a distinct possibility that Congress will eventually mandate these [voice-activated] systems," said Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, a market research firm in Tempe, Ariz. "England requires them now."
Telematics is a high-tech term for the satellite-based safety and information systems in some new vehicles -- the best known of which is probably General Motors' OnStar system.
ATX provides telematics services to 125,000 subscribers who have bought Ford, Jaguar, Lincoln-Mercury, Mercedes-Benz and Infiniti vehicles.
GM's OnStar says it has about 800,000 subscribers.
This is the first product ATX has developed since acquiring Protection One Mobile Services of Irving in a $28 million deal last year, Mr. Wallace said.
ATX, a privately held company, was previously based in San Antonio. All 200 of the company's employees now work out of a stylish new building in the Las Colinas area.
"Motorists want a simple, voice-based system that reduces driver distraction and gets them where they need to be or the information they must have," said Steve Millstein, president and chief executive officer of ATX.
Emerging technology
The system, which is based on IBM speech technology, is important to sustaining growth at ATX, Mr. Wallace said. The company currently provides the call centers that respond to inquiries from drivers who are using telematics systems.
Most of the new systems from ATX and others probably will end up as factory options on new cars and trucks. Telematics systems that are now on new vehicles are priced from about $1,000 to $2,500, though automakers often discount them. Subscribers also pay $199 to $399 annually for the call-center services, which are provided by cellular telephone. No price has been set for the voice-activated system.
"We know that people will pay for safety," Mr. Wallace said. "If telematics bills itself as a mobile Web, I think we will have difficulty selling it. But if the bottom line is we become a safety enhancement, I think consumers will pay for that."
Projected growth
The advent of more sophisticated systems is expected to push telematics sales from about $4 billion this year to $24 billion by 2005, according to a UBS Warburg LLC report.
Some analysts question that growth, noting that consumers may view telematics as an extravagance in a slowing economy. In addition, some safety advocates might continue to target telematics -- even with voice activation. While not as distracting as cell phones, the new systems will still keep drivers from devoting full attention to the road.
Nonetheless, UBS Warburg says, "We believe telematics is set to explode." It projects strong growth over the entire next decade, hitting $47.2 billion by 2010.
ATX does not disclose its annual revenue or revenue growth.
In October, the company demonstrated its system to automakers at the Convergence 2000 electronics show in Detroit.
ATX did not promise to be first to market with a system, nor does it view that as critical to its success, Mr. Wallace said. Rather, he said, it is more important to get the system right -- a contention that Mr. Strauss of Forward Concepts generally agrees with.
"You can always spot the pioneers," Mr. Strauss said. "They are the ones with arrows in their backs."
When the completed system is unveiled to automakers next summer, Mr. Gee thinks it will have some advantages over its competitors.
For one, ATX's voice-activation technology operates out of the call center in Irving rather than from hardware installed in a customer's car.
"It gives us greater flexibility," he said. "The hardware on a car can only understand about 500 words or phrases. An off-car system such as this can recognize 10,000 words or phrases. There's a virtually unlimited dialect that it will understand."
The system has "pseudo intelligence" and will respond to multiple variations of yes or no -- including "yes, yep, yeah, all right and go ahead," Mr. Gee said. Also, ATX says, if users don't want to talk to a computer, they can always opt for a real live operator at the call center.
Despite those potential advantages, ATX may have to work to convince automakers to include the systems in their new vehicles, analysts say.
In the initial years, automakers "won't make much money off of it," Mr. Wallace acknowledged. "But it will improve customer loyalty. Every time it helps somebody, that bond between customer and [automaker] is strengthened. We're telling [automakers] that now they will have the ability to touch their customers every day."
CES: PC hides in Nokia media terminal
Cell phone maker tries a new number
BY JON FORTT
Mercury News
It was one of the most intriguing new products at the Consumer Electronics Show, and Nokia doesn't have a name for it yet. For now it they call it ``The Nokia Media Terminal.''
The media terminal, due at the end of this year, is meant to reside in the living room. It resembles a George Foreman Grill, except it's gray and has ``Nokia'' emblazoned on it instead of the boxer's signature.
The list of its capabilities is a long one. Its hard disk records and pauses live TV, it stores and plays digital photos and video, and plays MP3 music files. The media terminal even comes with its own video games, and the potential to download more games off the Internet.
Nokia, the biggest cell phone maker in the world, is branching out. The company says the media terminal's price will be competitive, which suggests it will sell for around $400 like the digital video recorder from TiVo.
One problem though. Nokia's media terminal isn't a digital video recorder like TiVo. It's a personal computer in sheep's clothing, and it runs the Linux operating system.
Nokia's marketing folks might get upset when they read this, because Nokia doesn't like to call the media terminal a PC. But it is one, as the engineers who built it will admit.
Here's what makes it a PC. The media terminal has a 366-megahertz processor, 64 megabytes of memory and a 20-gigabyte hard drive. It comes with a Mozilla Web browser ready to handle Java and 128-bit encryption. In the back it has two USB ports (which can easy be made into eight or more using a hub) and a FireWire port. Out of the box, it's ready to hook into either a TV or a computer monitor.
More than all this, what makes the media terminal a PC is Nokia's decision not to keep it from being one.
This might sound silly or even a little perverse to experienced computer users, but a new industry fad is to build what could be a decent PC and then cripple it to make sure it doesn't act like one. These hobbled machines often can't download or install software, or read e-mail attachments. Instead of Windows, they run operating systems from Linux, Be or some other company. These crippled machines are called Internet appliances, and they are billed as easy for beginners to use.
There's nothing wrong with that; there is certainly a place for simpler computers. A cool thing about Nokia's media terminal, though, is that it was built to be easy to use, while leaving the door open for Nokia to suddenly, with minor modifications to hardware and software, turn it into a fully functioning Linux-based personal computer.
There are barriers. You can attach CD-ROM drives, printers and scanners to the media terminal, but before they will work you must download driver software -- something Linux fans will be more than happy to do. Once that's done, there is some decent software out there for Linux, including inexpensive productivity programs that are compatible with the Microsoft Office suite.
Yes, Nokia has not decided what to call its box yet.
``Trojan Horse'' has a nice ring to it.
The Latest Infotainment Center
By Darshan Somashekar - 09/10/00
Print Article - Email Article - Post Your Comments
Nokia Media Terminal - Nokia 6000 Connection Drive Irving, Texas 75039 - www.nokia.com
The latest "home theater convergence product" comes from Nokia, in the form of the Media Terminal. Like the EDGE Media Appliance Concept, the Nokia product intends to serve as an infotainment center by providing digital TV, Internet access, and personal digital recording (like the TiVo).
The Media Terminal is a platform that uses Mozilla, Linux, x86 architecture, and HTML to provide access via multiple display devices, such as TV sets and computer screens. The software platform uses the mainly open source languages to provide extensibility and flexibility, and may give developers the option to provide add-ons. In fact, Nokia will soon release an API of the platform on http://www.linuxtv.org.
The Media Terminal is Nokia's first product in its Connected Home series. It will be offered over ADSL connections, although we're currently not sure on how that will translate for U.S. television sets. The Terminal will offer fast Internet access through the ADSL connection, and will also include digital services like home shopping and banking online. Using the personal recording feature, the Media Terminal will allow you to pause and rewind live TV. Also, you'll be able to split the screen between Internet and TV. Nokia promises that you'll be able to play 3D networked games, send and receive e-mails, view digital camera images, and play MP3 files as well.
The Media Terminal will provide an array of features unmatched by the current interactive TV leader, Microsoft's WebTV. Nokia is set to introduce the Media Terminal in the second quarter of 2001. We'll be waiting to see if Nokia will keep its promises.
100GB HDD Plans Call for 7,200rpm at US$50
Hard disk drive capacities will soon surpass 100 Gbytes, and drives are now being developed to fulfill more specialized roles, such as for use in AV equipment.
The capacity of hard disk drives (HDD) is finally on the verge of surpassing 100 Gbytes, and a number of 100-Gbyte products are expected to hit the shelves from this month.
The first will be from Seagate Technology of the US, with a 180 Gbyte, 3.5-inch HDD designed for servers, which will be shipped in April 2001 (Fig 1). Units for personal computers (PC) will reach the 100-Gbyte level shortly as well, with Maxtor Corp of the US planning to ship volume-production drives of 120 to 160 Gbytes in August 2001.
Doubling Capacity 2001
Capacities like these are possible because HDD areal recording density is increasing with phenomenal speed. It has been roughly doubling every year for several years now, and the pace seems likely to continue in 2001 (Fig 2). Seagate and Maxtor products offer per-platter capacities that are roughly double that of the volume-production designs of a year ago.
Competing firms plan to boost recording densities at a similar pace. Capacities of 3.5-inch HDDs for desktop PCs have offered a maximum of about 20 Gbytes per platter across the board. Products shipped during the first quarter of 2001 have boosted this to about 30 Gbytes, and there will be further increases in the second or third quarter to about 40 Gbytes. The same situation exists for 3.5-inch HDDs as for servers: the per-platter capacity of a disk in the spring of 2001 will be about 18 Gbytes, roughly double what it was a year ago.
The continuing increase in recording density will apply not only to 3.5-inch drives, but also to the 2.5-inch designs used in notebook PCs. During the first quarter of 2001, per-platter densities have risen to about 15 Gbytes, boosting total drive capacity to about 30 Gbytes, and reaching a parity with the 3.5-inch drives on the market.
The increase in density is sure to continue through next year, at least, with the capacity of 3.5-inch HDDs for PCs rising to 60 Gbytes per platter, and that of server drives to over 36 Gbytes. The Seagate and Maxtor products mentioned are designed for embedded use, which maximizes the number of platters; they are therefore available in limited quantities only. However, in 2002, even popularly-priced drives will surpass 100 Gbytes. And when the pace of change is considered, a 100-Gbyte, 2.5-inch drive cannot be far off.
Limited Capacity Needs
It seems that HDD manufacturers have now reached a point where they are wondering if there really is a need for more capacity. As one source at Western Digital Japan commented: "We think that there will be demand for HDDs with 40 Gbytes per platter for desktop PCs, but it's not very clear if there really is a market above about 60 Gbytes per platter."
There is some basis for their apprehensiveness; it is becoming difficult to boost value-added content through larger capacity only. When a new HDD is released onto the market, the price usually begins to drop after a few months, generally ending the product's life. The major profits for the HDD manufacturer have been from large-capacity products released in advance of the competition. Even a lead of one month on the release of a new large-capacity drive has meant a massive difference in profit.
In recent years, however, due to the large and continuing fall in prices, it has become difficult for manufacturers to earn sufficient profits even by releasing large-capacity products rapidly. Only two years ago, many in the industry were saying that it would be extremely difficult to get the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) price for a PC 3.5-inch HDD to below US$100. But now new products are shipped at about that price, having dropped to below US$80 within the period of a few months (Fig 3). As a result, a number of HDD manufacturers fell into the red in 2000.
Adding Value
Many HDD manufacturers have therefore concluded that larger capacity by itself cannot boost profits, and they are moving to find other ways to add value. The search is underway for new concepts in various disk drive sectors, such as 3.5-inch drives for PCs, 3.5-inch drives for servers, and 2.5-inch drives.
The first strategy taken with regards to 3.5-inch HDDs aimed at the PC market is the shift towards high-performance designs. Until recently, most drives in this sector ran at about 5,400rpm, but prices have dropped so much that manufacturers are now positioning 7,200rpm drives as their core models. The most common model now available from many manufacturers is a 7,200rpm drive, with a per-platter capacity of 20 Gbytes.
Some manufacturers have abandoned development of 5,400rpm drives for desktop PCs, and are concentrating on 7,200rpm designs. IBM Corp, for example, has announced that it will not increase capacities for its 5,400rpm drive line. Fujitsu Ltd has said that the 20 Gbytes per platter density of its current 5,400rpm HDD for desktop PCs will be the last that the company makes.
The data transfer rate is higher on a 7,200rpm drive, which makes it more difficult to increase the recording density than for a 5,400rpm design. Platter capacities of 30 to 40 Gbytes will not appear for 7,200rpm drives until several months after they are available for 5,400rpm models. The reason why manufacturers still want to shift to 7,200rpm systems is because they believe that price erosion with high-performance drives will be easier to control than with large-capacity drives.
The market may not change as suddenly as HDD manufacturers expect. According to a study by the Institute of Information Technology, Ltd, shipment volumes for the two types of drive will reach parity in 2002 (Fig 4a).
Price Target of US$50
HDD manufacturers are now targeting the brand new market for digital home appliances, including audio-visual (AV) equipment and game systems (Fig 5). Unlike the declining PC market, which is heading towards a slump, the digital home appliance market is potentially vibrant. The scale of the market is expected to rival that of the PC, and perhaps even to exceed it; and because digital home appliances handle voice and video, they will require even more capacity than PCs. If the market grows, as is hoped, then these firms believe that it will be possible to use the same business model as is currently used - that of adding value with larger capacity.
These manufacturers are already selling HDDs for digital home appliances, but most of them are just minor modifications to HDDs developed originally for PC application. The products shipping in 2001 will be fundamentally different in concept. They will be specifically designed for the home appliance market, at the absolute minimum cost. Manufacturers will be competing not only on capacity, but on cost as well.
Maxtor, for example, plans to commercialize a 3.5-inch HDD at the price of US$50. It will turn at 5,400rpm, with only one platter and one head. These limited specifications will make it possible to manufacture the drive at a much lower price than that of PC drives. The 10- and 15-Gbyte models have been volume-produced since January this year, and a 20-Gbyte model is slated to ship in April.
Fujitsu also plans to market a low-priced model in the second half of 2001, with a different design from that used in PC drives. It will also turn at 5,400rpm and will have one platter, but will offer two heads and a 40-Gbyte capacity.
Performance, Price
The industry is also moving to provide 3.5-inch HDDs for servers with value-added features other than just capacity. There is a strong trend towards stressing the performance and the price, rather than the capacity, of HDDs for server applications.
The core specifications for products that are shipping this year are 10,000rpm, with capacities of up to 73 Gbytes. Products with similar specifications have already been available for about a year, but with a difference in the per-platter capacity. Capacity has been doubled in only a year to 18 Gbytes per platter.
Even though the bytes per platter have increased, none of the firms have maximized HDD capacity, because there is very little demand for HDDs with large capacities of 100 Gbytes or more. Instead, manufacturers have chosen to leave drive capacity at about the same levels, and reduce the number of platters instead. A 73-Gbyte drive, for example, can now be made with four platters instead of the conventional eight. This design change makes it possible to create a thinner drive, reducing it from 41.3mm to 25.4mm, and to slash power consumption. There are fewer parts, improving price competitiveness.
In a bold contrast to this industry trend is the Seagate 180-Gbyte drive. The firm hopes to pioneer a whole new market with the larger capacity. Instead of targeting conventional server demand, which requires high speed and large capacity, they are aiming at data warehousing and similar applications, where capacity is crucial, while speed is not.
Shifting to 15,000rpm
Manufacturers of HDDs for servers are also actively boosting speed, and in 2001 the most popular HDDs are expected to be running at 10,000rpm (Fig 4b). With the exception of Seagate, no manufacturer is planning future models in the 7,200rpm line.
Most companies are also working on even faster drives for the future. While only Seagate has been working on a 15,000rpm HDD, Fujitsu and IBM will both follow suit shortly, with IBM planning to ship in the first quarter of 2001, and Fujitsu in the third quarter.
One key characteristic of a 15,000rpm drive is that the maximum capacity is lower than that of a 10,000rpm drive. At that speed, the disk diameter must be reduced to curb excess vibration and heat, and given the same areal recording density, naturally per-platter capacity drops.
The maximum capacity of the volume-production drive offered by Seagate now is only 18 Gbytes, and Fujitsu plans to commercialize a drive with a maximum capacity of 36.4 Gbytes, at most.
Extra Capacity 2.5" HDD
Compared to 3.5-inch drives, 2.5-inch HDD designs must still contend with considerable demand for larger capacity. It usually takes them six to 12 months to catch up with the growing capacities of 3.5-inch HDDs for desktop PCs. There is strong demand for the provision of 2.5-inch drives for notebook PCs - their key application - offering the same storage capacity found in 3.5-inch HDDs. Hence, capacity will remain the key factor in discriminating between products for some time to come.
Hitachi Ltd and Toshiba Corp are in the lead when it comes to offering larger capacities for 2.5-inch HDDs. In the first quarter of 2001, they were slated to ship 2.5-inch HDDs with a per-platter capacity of 15 Gbytes, which measure just 9.5mm in height. Fujitsu and IBM are expected to announce similar products in the first half of 2001, while in the fourth quarter both Hitachi and Toshiba are said to be gearing up to release HDDs that have a per-platter capacity of 20 Gbytes.
Smaller Drives
Manufacturers of 2.5-inch HDDs are also searching for a new path for growth, and have selected further miniaturization as the best option. More and more firms are likely to enter the 1.8-inch HDD market, offering drives that are even smaller than 2.5-inch models.
The 1.8-inch drives are smaller and require less power than 2.5-inch drives, leading manufacturers to believe that they may be able to find new markets, such as for portable AV equipment. And the 1.8-inch drives contribute towards making notebook PCs thinner and lighter, while extending battery life.
Only Toshiba currently has a 1.8-inch HDD in volume production, but Hitachi plans to follow suit this year, and while IBM has yet to announce the timing of its product launch, the company also has a product waiting in the wings.
HDD manufacturers are especially interested in drives with AT Adapter (ATA) interfaces, designed for embedded use. Toshiba, which holds the lead in PC Card ATA interface products, will begin volume-production of a model with an ATA interface in the second quarter of 2001. The per-platter capacity will probably be 5 Gbytes, with a data transfer rate of 66 Mbytes/s, using UltraDMA/66.
by Chikashi Horikiri and Takuji Imai
Websites:
Fujitsu: http://www.fujitsu.co.jp/en
Hitachi: http://global.hitachi.com
IBM: http://www.ibm.com
Institute of Information Technology: http://www.iit.co.jp
Maxtor: http://www.maxtor.com
Seagate Technology: http://www.seagate.com
Toshiba: http://www.toshiba.co.jp/index.htm
Western Digital: http://www.wdc.com
Motorola's iRadioTM system now incorporates IBM software
Las Vegas, January 6, 2001.... Committed to maintaining its position as the leader in Telematics, Motorola has developed the iRadio system, an in-vehicle platform for automakers that combines entertainment, information, navigation, emergency calling and communication into one complete, driver-friendly system. In a move that further expands the iRadio system, Motorola (NYSE: MOT) announced today that it will license JavaTM technology and voice recognition software from IBM, for use in the Motorola Telematics iRadioTM system.
When will the Motorola iRadio™ Telematics System be available?
A: It is available as a prototype today. Beta tests of the Motorola iRadio™ Telematics System are expected in the first quarter of 2001. Motorola has begun working with automotive manufacturers and other automotive electronics suppliers. Different models of the iRadio™ Telematics System are expected to start showing up in cars in 18 to 24 months
moxa--What is the Motorola iRadio™ Telematics System?
A: The latest in in-vehicle technology, the Motorola iRadio™ Telematics System combines entertainment, information, navigation, emergency calling and communication into one complete, driver-friendly system. The Motorola iRadio™ Telematics System lets drivers stay connected via wireless web in a safe, fun and productive way.
It will enable drivers to capture music on demand; access turn-by-turn navigation and listen to real time traffic reports; download audio books; access voicemail; update address book; receive the latest news and weather reports; tune in to desired movie reviews; get updated stock portfolio information and access e-mail. Complete with voice recognition and text-to-speech technologies, the Motorola iRadio™ Telematics System is essentially a Web-based network device which allows organized, easy access to content originating from multiple sources, whether via the Web, cellular communications, broadcast and satellite transmissions or traditional AM/FM bands, among others. It’s the new heart of smart cars.
OnStar, Wingcast, XM Radio, General Motors, Ford and DaimlerChrysler meet to Discuss Strategic Telematics in Detroit, May 15-16
DETROIT, Feb. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Leaders from all the major players in automotive telematics will meet in Detroit this May 15-16 to discuss revenue models, collaboration, strategic planning and the industry vision of the future of telematics at the EyeForAuto Telematics 2001 conference at Cobo Center on May 15 -16. www.eyeforauto.com/telematics
Chet Huber, President and CEO of OnStar and Harel Kodesh, President and CEO of WingCast will make keynote speeches at the conference.
Other keynote panel speakers include Gary Lapidus from Goldman Sachs and senior level executives from Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, WirelessCar, Lear, Visteon, MobileAria, Clarion, Denso, Siemens, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, CUE Corp, Ericsson, UBS Warburg, Deutsche Bank, CNN, ATX Technologies, Webraska, Sun Microsystems and many more.
The two-day strategic conference focuses on the big issues in automotive telematics -- Revenue models, selling safety applications, Tier 1 electronics integration, Wall St. views, platform standardisation, traffic information, mobile services and linking up the car, the office and the home via wireless technologies.
A special "Telematics and Wall St. Confidence" keynote discussion panel takes place on May 15, featuring Gary Lapidus of Goldman Sachs, Saul Rubin of UBS Warburg, Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Jonathan Lawrence of Dain Raucher Wessels and John Edwards of Deutsche Bank.
The full conference program and speakers is at: www.eyeforauto.com/telematics/program.html
EyeForAuto Telematics 2001 will be co-locating with the Detroit Auto Interiors show 2001. The Auto Interiors Expo in 2001 will focus on telematics technologies. Click on www.autointeriorshow.com for more information.
EyeForAuto's print magazine -- Telematics Update, launches in March -- email address details to subscribe@eyeforauto.com for a free subscription.
intel - telematics
To:Pamela Murray who started this subject
From: Pamela Murray Thursday, Apr 26, 2001 11:48 AM
View Replies (1) / Respond to of 183
Intel drives in-car computer effort
By By John G. Spooner, ZDNet News
The chip giant, along with five software companies, commercializes in-car computers that offer hands-free cell phone calls, mapping and entertainment systems.
Intel has discovered a method of fitting at least five software companies under the dashboard or in the backseat of a car.
The chipmaker announced Wednesday that it has forged relationships with Microsoft, QNX Software Systems, Wind River Systems, IBM, Fonix and Lernout & Hauspie to commercialize in-car computers.
Otherwise known as telematic systems, these in-car computers promise to perform any number of tasks from facilitating hands-free cell phone calls and finding urgently needed directions to providing backseat entertainment systems and in-car commerce.
In-car computers based on Intel's chips could begin shipping as soon as the second half of 2002, the company said.
The systems will use Intel's StrongARM--and later its XScale--processors, as well as speech-based user interfaces, Pat Kerrigan, director of Intel's in-car computing unit, said Wednesday. The unit is part of Intel's Wireless Communications and Computing Group.
"We're working with the big guys in consumer electronics, as well as trying to understand the...needs of the automobile manufactures," Kerrigan said.
The company is also serving its own needs. As it moves into telematics, Intel sees the possibility of boosting chip sales.
"From our (processor) building-block perspective, it's all the same stuff" as in a cell phone or handheld, "just with a different bezel," Kerrigan said.
Thilo Koslowski, an automotive analyst at Gartner, said telematics "will be the fastest-growing market (for processors) over the next couple of years." The mobile computing market in general will continue to grow steadily, Koslowski said, but "really vehicles represent the only platform with huge growth potential."
For now, however, Intel is playing catch-up with others such as OnStar, General Motors' dashboard technology division. OnStar already provides services such as directions and the ability to notify police in case of an emergency. The service uses GPS (Global Positioning System) and cellular networks.
Intel is working with consumer electronics companies such as Sony and Clarion, as well as with automakers to develop a range of in-car computers--from very basic ones for communication and navigation to full-on Internet-based entertainment and commerce systems.
Basic systems would add only $100 to $200 to the cost of a new car. SUVs and minivans would likely offer more elaborate and costly systems with the aim of entertaining children on long trips.
Still, Koslowski said, the future is cloudy. "Right now the problem is everyone is pushing new technology without knowing whether consumers are willing to pay for it. It doesn't seem to be that consumers are dying for these applications--at least not yet."
There is also a safety issue to consider. The debate on in-car computers causing driver distraction continues, he said, but "I don't think it's as bad as a lot of people think."
Of course, Kerrigan added, "you always want to keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel. So what you need are voice engines."
Intel enlisted Microsoft for its Windows CE operating system; QNX for its QNX operating system and development tools; and Wind River Systems for VxWorks OS, tools and Java technology. The trio will, in turn, support Intel's Integrated Performance Primitives, a software library for speech, image and signal processing, as well as multimedia such as MP3 and MPEG files.
Intel turned to IBM to provide, among other things, the middleware that will allow in-car computers to work with large communication networks. IBM, Fonix and Lernout & Hauspie will offer speech-recognition software that can allow drivers to use voice commands to operate their in-car computers. Lernout & Hauspie, for example, is tweaking its noise-resistant speech recognition ASR 200 and ASR 1600 software and its text-to-speech TTS3000 application to run on StrongARM and XScale chips.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/zd/20010411/tc/intel_drives_in-...
I TELL YOU PEOPLE AGAIN- BEWARE-- VOICE ENABLED PDAS ARE COMING
SOONER THAN YOU THINK
Conversay providing voice recognition technology to Mobile Mutant
By Lee, Kyeong-min
Saturday, April 28, 2001
A multinational voice recognition business Conversay Korea (chaired by Lee Seong-su http://www.conversay.com) announced on April 27 that it would provide an embedded voice recognition technology (engine) to Mobile Mutant (chaired by Shin Yong-han http://www.mobilemutant.com), a domestic firm specializing in flash player technology.
The domestic developer is to take a full advantage of the voice recognition engine in developing personal digital assistant (PDA) applications, which understand and respond to human speech, to be released in the market next month. It also plans to expand the range of technological applications into e-commerce and educational software.
For Sale: Troubled Speech-Technology Company
Lernout & Hauspie must be sold in its entirety to continue operation, says CEO.
Joris Evers, IDG News Service
Friday, April 27, 2001
Lernout & Hauspie--the whole company--is now up for sale, according to its President and Chief Executive Officer Philippe Bodson. During an L&H shareholders meeting Friday in Ieper, Belgium, Bodson said that the individual sale of certain parts of the company will most likely not raise enough money to let it continue work on speech technology. L&H has only enough money to continue operating for another couple of months, he said.
The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last November, and has been in the news regularly ever since. Just this week Belgian police arrested founders Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, and former managing director Nico Willaert, in connection with a fraud investigation of the company.
L&H has been trying to sell translation unit Mendez, with a target sales price of $160 million. However, to date Credit Suisse First Boston has been unable to find a buyer, Bodson said. It's likely the company will sell the unit below the asking price, but the sale probably will not be concluded soon, he said.
Sale of Mendez below the target price will prevent L&H from executing its restructuring program. The company was planning to use the proceeds of the sale to pay off certain creditors and finance part of the company's operations. L&H has said it has a debt burden of 603 million euros (about $544 million).
Because of changes in the market situation, Bodson said the only viable solution now is the sale of all L&H units, the swift merger of units with other market players, or joint ventures with partners. Otherwise, Bodson said, all personnel will walk off to other companies, resulting in an empty shell at L&H.
However, he did note that the plan to sell the entire company could be reversed if market conditions change or if the sale of individual units turns out to work well after all.
Company Urged to Find Support
A representative of L&H shareholders speaking at the meeting urged Bodson to work to win financial support for the struggling company.
"You (Bodson) have made clear to us that the restructuring plan is more and more a liquidation plan," said a partner at consultancy firm Déminor International SA, who represented about 2,000 L&H shareholders at the meeting, in a question-and-answer session with L&H management.
He called on Bodson to negotiate with the largest creditors--a number of Belgian banks--and to win their support for L&H. He also called on former L&H managers, legal advisors, and accountants to drop their financial claims against the company out of a sense of obligation and reverence for what the company had been.
At the court-ordered shareholders meeting, attended by several hundred shareholders, Bodson also presented L&H's results for January and February of this year.
Net loss in the first two months of 2001--in U.S. dollars--was $65 million, where a loss of $93 million was projected. Revenue was at $46 million, above the projected $41 million, said Bodson. The company had set up a financial plan when it asked for bridge financing. The earnings statement will also be filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
According to Belgian media reports Friday, company cofounders Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, as well as former managing director Nico Willaert, are still in jail. Police reportedly arrested them Thursday as part of an investigation into fraud at the troubled company. The public prosecutor in Ieper would confirm on Thursday only that three men had been taken into custody for questioning.
Microsoft voice-recognition To Launch Office XP May 31
(04/27/01, 5:42 p.m. ET) CRN
Microsoft Corp.'s chief software architect and founder, Bill Gates, will formally unveil Office XP to the marketplace at an event in New York May 31. Office XP, formerly code-named Office 10, is the first version of the Microsoft (stock: MSFT) application suite to incorporate voice-recognition technology. Users will be able to open and close files, save documents, and perform other common tasks via voice command, executives have promised.
Hand-Held Voice Mail
Advanced voice compression puts a new spin on digital voice recorders.
(11/25/97) -- Do you ever make a phone call knowing full well that you'll reach voice mail? You're not alone. In fact, "disconnected architecture," in which you decide when to pick up voice or e-mail, is more popular than ever.
To accommodate the disconnected, Lernout & Hauspie--a company in which Microsoft recently invested $45 million to accelerate voice-enabled computing--is developing Voice Pager, a hybrid pager/voice recorder that receives voice mail wirelessly.
Lernout & Hauspie, which built the low-bit rate voice compression technology, is developing the 900-MHz pager with Oi Electric of Japan (35 percent of which is owned by Mitsubishi). It receives alphanumeric as well as voice messages. A computer at the National Dispatch Center--the company that sends most of the wireless pages in the world--answers the phone and delivers the voice message to the pager. The unit stores up to 30 messages of 20 seconds each. Voice Pager is currently in test markets in Asia.
In another spin on digital voice recorders, IBM and Olympus recently introduced a portable digital voice-recorder system that can convert over an hour of voice into text. Record the voice, then transfer the file over an included cable to your PC, and IBM's continuous-speech program ViaVoice converts the voice file to text.
An English version will be available in the first quarter of the year, to be followed shortly after by French, German, and Japanese versions.--Carol Levin
23.11.1997
This week at Comdex, IBM and Olympus offer a glimpse of an advanced technology solution that promises to greatly enhance productivity for mobile workers. The voice-enabled product combines Olympus' D1000, IBM's ViaVoice continuous speech recognition software, and Intel's Flash Memory Miniature Card .
Users can dictate a document into the Olympus Audio Recorder, remove the memory chip and place it into the PCMCIA slot of an IBM ThinkPad equipped with IBM's ViaVoice continuous speech recognition software. ViaVoice then transcribes the user's recorded voice into a typed document that can be further edited, formatted and printed, just as with any word processor file.
IBM voice-enables consumer appliances
13 November 2000
IBM announced recently that it is teaming with Canon to drive the implementation of certain voice-enabled consumer devices, such as kitchen appliances, toys and game consoles.
PHILIPPINES (Manila Bulletin) - The introduction of IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition allows consumers to simply use their voices to speak to a variety of workplace and home devices. The new IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition joins the existing offerings of embedded ViaVoice products. These include:
IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Multiplatform Edition which enables developers to create voice-enabled mobile solutions.
IBM ViaVoice SDK for Linux which enables Linux developers to incorporate voice recognition technology into their next generation of applications.
"The IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition is ideal for a hands-free, eyes-free environment, where consumers don't need to rely on their hands or eyes to interact with an electronic device they just need their voice," said W. S. Osborne, general manager, IBM Voice Systems.
Customers will be able to interact with the smallest of devices and consumer appliances. Instead of pushing a button to begin brewing a cup of coffee, a customer will just need to direct it through words, opening up a world of possibilities for maximizing voice interaction between humans and machines.
"Creating voice interfaces for these small devices marks the success of voice recognition technology," said Dr. Kazuya Matsumoto, chairman of Canon Research Centre Europe Ltd. "Canon looks forward to working with IBM to bring a voice interface to a variety of devices and appliances."
Requiring only 510 MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second) for voice recognition processing, IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition provides an active vocabulary of up to 50 words for consumers who personalize their own devices, such as cell phones and PDAs. It also offers the option of pre-loading 10-20 active words for user independent vocabularies, ideal for electronic devices that need only simplified commands, such as kitchen appliances and toys.
IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition's vocabulary can expand to the amount of flash memory in the device. Applications can dynamically switch between active vocabularies or share a single vocabulary.
Part of the IBM Voice Systems product line, IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition offers a low cost solution for incorporating voice capability into a number of mobile devices. Customers will find entry level command and control features, high accuracy rates, vocabulary development and compatibility, telephone quality microphones, as well as worldwide support from IBM and Canon.
IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition vocabularies may be customized by the user or manufacturer to operate in any language and will be available by the end of this year.
Surfing from behind the wheel
By Joe Wilcox
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
January 12, 2000, 4:00 a.m. PT
The car PC has been a staple of trade shows and technology conferences for years, but now it appears that these devices may start making their way in larger numbers to consumers.
IBM and Motorola tomorrow will announce a partnership under which the two companies will begin to develop wireless Internet technology for cars so people can send email, check on stocks or engage in impulse buying while they drive. The first IBM-Motorola devices could appear in cars by 2002, but others are working on similar projects.
For Motorola, which already makes in-car wireless and computing devices for Mercedes-Benz, General Motors and other carmakers, the move broadens its existing portfolio of "telematics" products.
IBM, meanwhile, is expanding on a recent binge of wireless partnerships, such as with Sprint and VodaFone, that take it into uncharted territory.
Telematics are embedded, in-vehicle electronic systems used for improving safety. Telematic devices can provide, among other applications, navigation information, linkups to service companies for roadside assistance, protection against theft, and wireless Internet connections for accessing email.
Motorola has provided carmakers with telematic devices, such as global positioning systems (GPS), since 1996. Interactive Internet devices, however, constitute a new area for the communications giant. The company last week at the Consumer Electronics Show unveiled a prototype of iRadio, a multimedia, multi-access device for connecting wirelessly to the Web, satellites and cellular networks.
Motorola touts iRadio as a next-generation entertainment system for obtaining real-time traffic reports, downloading and listening to digital music and audio books, and accessing voice mail and email.
Motorola announced last week that it was working with Command Audio to integrate "audio-on-demand" technology into the iRadio system. Command Audio's technology lets users who subscribe to its service preselect material they want to listen to and transmits it to cars via FM radio waves.
Because the content is specially formatted, the Command Audio receiver can actually scan forward and backward through broadcasts to let users find news stories they want, for instance. Executives with Redwood City-based Command Audio said Motorola is now one of the largest shareholders in the privately held firm.
"There is also an e-commerce angle that will let people buy things from their car," said Mike Bordelon, vice president of Motorola's telematics computing group. "But to offer that and other features across that space we need one end-to-end solution, and that's where IBM comes in."
IBM will provide many of the back-end computing systems and services that will enable iRadio and other concept devices to work.
"There are a lot of things that happen in the device that are very much tied to the server," said Jon Prial, director of marketing for IBM's pervasive computing division. "We focus on all that from synchronization, database, messaging and voice technology--all technologies from IBM for enabling the devices."
Like Motorola and IBM, Sun, Hewlett-Packard and other "big iron" server makers plan similar initiatives using their back-end computing services for enabling a wide-range of wireless devices, including those built into cars.
Other companies are also betting in-car wireless Web devices will appeal to consumers. GM and Sony last week said they would develop e-vehicles with Internet access.
Microsoft has partnered with Clarion, Daewoo, Intel and others on the AutoPC, an in-dashboard navigation system using Windows Powered, formerly known as Windows CE.
Technology Business Research analyst Joe Ferlazzo foresees carmakers taking a more aggressive role providing these technologies rather than waiting for Motorola, IBM and others to deliver them. He pointed to alliances announced Monday between GM and AOL, and Ford and Yahoo.
As part of the GM deal, AOL will provide content accessible through the carmaker's OnStar communications system. OnStar, which was designed for GM by Motorola and Delco Electronics, uses wireless and GPS capabilities for navigation, cellular phone access and roadside assistance.
"I don't think you will see devices coming directly out of Detroit so much as their partnering with other companies," Ferlazzo said. "GM and others are moving on their own as part of a trend to Internet-enable all the areas of our lives which are not yet Internet-enabled."
IBM and Motorola will co-market the wireless Web devices, the first of which will go to carmakers late this year and likely appear in 2002 models. DaimlerChrysler, GM and Volkswagen are some of the carmakers considering the devices.
At this point, neither company plans to sell the products directly to customers but instead through carmakers.
Cirrus Logic Eyeing Home Networking with Peak Audio Deal
Chipmaker Cirrus Logic said today it plans to acquire the assets of Peak Audio, and use the company's technology for planned networked audio systems for workplaces and homes. Home networking encompasses an emerging class of hardware and software products that network handheld devices, home entertainment components and PCs. Colorado-based Peak Audio develops and sells digital audio products to other businesses; Peak Audio's technology is used in the Sydney Opera House and the United States Senate Chamber. Eighteen Peak Audio engineers will join Cirrus. Cirrus expects the Peak acquisition to increase revenues within six months. Terms of the cash transaction were not disclosed. The deal is expected to close Monday.
Listen.com Cuts 24%, Citing Market Conditions
A spokesman for Listen.com confirmed the company laid off 35 employees yesterday, about 24% of its staff, citing difficult market conditions. Cuts occurred in almost all divisions, but did not affect employees brought on board following Listen.com's acquisition of streaming media company TuneTo.com earlier this year. Listen.com is not seeking any further funding at this time. The spokesman said Listen.com is considering further acquisitions, including an additional company with media delivery technology. Earlier this year the company shifted its strategy to licensing services including Listen Radio, whose clients include EMusic, Interscope Records and Sub Pop Records. Listen.com has received funding from all five major record label groups.
Sony Yearly Income Plummets, but Quarterly Revenues Rise
by Dave Brigham
Sony Corp. today reported a major income drop for the fiscal year, softened by increased fourth quarter income.
For the year ended March 31, the Japanese conglomerate reported an 86% net income decrease, to $134.8 million. The company attributed the drop in part to a loss of $228 million related to new accounting procedures required by the movie industry.
For the quarter, Sony had net income of $126 million, compared to a net loss of $295.9 million for the same period last year.
Most of the company's divisions reported sales growth. Sony Electronics reported a 21% yearly sales increase over last year. The division reported growth in sales of PCs, DVD players and home stereos, but declines in cassette recorders and telephones.
Earlier this week, Sony and Swedish mobile phone maker Ericsson agreed to merge their respective mobile phone businesses [see 04.24.01 Ericsson, Sony Joint Venture Counting on Wireless Entertainment]. Sony will invest between $300 million and $500 million in the venture; Ericsson will provide assets valued at about the same amount.
The joint venture hopes to capitalize on expected consumer demand for next-generation wireless services by selling phones and handheld devices that support streaming audio and video. Such devices could become distribution points for content from Sony's movie, music and games divisions.
For the year, Sony's games unit had a 2% sales boost, reflecting decreased software revenues and increased hardware sales. Yesterday, Sony said it plans this summer to release an official PlayStation2 gaming console based on the open source Linux platform, initially only for Japanese consumers. That decision comes less than three weeks after start-up hardware developer Indrema went out of business before its Linux-based home entertainment system could hit the market.
Sony's motion picture division recorded a 12% sales increase, due to higher box office revenues from films including "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "Charlie's Angels" and "The Wedding Planner." The unit's operating income, however, dropped approximately 93%, primarily caused by the adoption of a new film accounting standard, according to Sony.
Unlike most of Sony's businesses, Sony Music realized a 14% sales dip. U.S.-based Sony Music Entertainment, which laid off 10% of its workforce during the year, reported lower operating income, due in part to costs associated with various digital media and investment activities, the company said.
Three weeks ago, Sony Music and Universal Music Group announced a deal through which they will market their jointly developed Duet music subscription service with Yahoo [see 04.05.01 Yahoo to Market Duet Music Service, Music Strategy Still Unclear]. In addition to its 50% stake in Duet, Sony Music holds investments in about two dozen companies, including ARTISTdirect, I3Mobile, Launch Media and Reciprocal.
As of April 1, however, the label group's sister company, 550 Digital Media Ventures, assumed responsibility for most of Sony Music's investments [see 01.25.01 Sony Music Says Digital Media Costs Hurt Income].
Sony Music Entertainment Japan also reported lower sales, but realized increased operating income.
Looking forward, Sony Corp. said it expects its net income to increase nearly 800%, and its consolidated sales to increase by 9% for fiscal year 2002.
Loudeye Reports Increased Revenues, Losses
Loudeye Technologies reported first-quarter revenues of $1.9 million, a 17% increase over the same period last year; the company's pro forma net loss was $8.5 million ($.22 per share), a 33% increase over the same period a year ago. Loudeye expects its 2001 revenues to be 30% over last year's $11.5 million total. Earlier this month, Loudeye laid off 45% of its approximately 300 employees after acquiring the assets of OnAir Streaming Networks and purchasing music sampling service DiscoverMusic. Loudeye spent $5 million on the acquisitions. Loudeye encodes, stores and distributes digital media for clients including all five major label groups. Through its acquisition of DiscoverMusic, the company also operates a music sample service for online music retailers. The service will eventually include downloadable music, streaming movie trailers and Internet radio services. Loudeye's shares closed yesterday unchanged at $1.35.
NextAudio Files for Ch. 11 Protection, Waits for New Owner
NextAudio, which markets personalized Internet radio content to web portals and broadband outlets, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Durham, N.C.-based company will continue operations until its assets are auctioned on May 23. NextAudio provides downloadable content which users may play on a PC or compatible portable device. The company hopes to continue operations under its new owner.
Chatty Cars, Big Bro and More
Wired News Radio
12:22 p.m. April 24, 2001 PDT
Don't worry if you forget your name. IBM is working on technology so that anyone who sees you, knows it. And if nobody sees you? Don't worry, there's going to be a car that talks to you. Lot's of gadgety talk here.
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webnoize ed-op piece re creative labs
April 27, 2001 marketplace . marketing
Creative's Push into CE Players
Creative Technology's latest quarterly losses may signal more than rough times in the tech sector. The core business where the company has made its name -- sound products -- has shifted in a way of which most people aren't really aware.
According to an industry watcher who has long followed PC component manufacturers, Creative doesn't have the lock on the OEM market for sound in PCs that it once had. Part of the problem is the company's premium-product image. The truth is CE and computer makers can emulate Creative's sound chips and buy sound processing products from other sources at lower prices, without having to license Creative's front end players and software.
Creative's premium-product image extended to its portable digital music players, too. The original Nomad Jukebox cost $500. Its street price was recently slashed to under $300, and what you get for it -- 6 gigs of music storage -- is impressive. But Creative may have come to the party too late to make much of a difference in the market.
April 27, 2001
finance . other
Looking to Halt Declining Sales, Creative Turns to Digital Music Players
by Jay Kumar
Citing a difficult economic climate and company restructuring, Creative Technology yesterday reported a third-quarter net loss of $101 million, a 213% drop from the same period last year. Now Creative is looking to portable consumer electronics products to help reverse its financial setbacks.
The company's sales for the three-month period ended March 31 were $263 million, down nearly 21% from the third quarter in 2000. Last month, Creative announced plans to cut about 10% of its 5,000 employees worldwide and to close its Malvern, Penn., manufacturing plant.
The layoffs and plant closing resulted in Creative taking a one-time restructuring charge of $19.8 million; the company also took a $75.4 million write-down on the value of its investment portfolio, which includes weak Asian-Pacific properties such as portal aggregator Catcha and Internet telephony site Mediaring. During the quarter, Creative repurchased approximately 892,000 shares at a cost of $8.6 million. The company plans to continue its buyback program.
Creative's share price closed at $9.15 today, far off its 52-week high of $29.44.
Creative sells Sound Blaster sound cards, Video Blaster graphics cards, Web cameras, CD and DVD drives, as well as portable digital audio devices.
In an attempt to recover from losses and to drive product sales, Creative aggressively has cut the prices of consumer electronics products such as the Nomad Jukebox and Nomad II MP3 player [see 4.23.01 Dropping Hard-Disk Costs Let Jukebox Makers Sell for Less]. Signaling Creative's commitment to digital music consumer electronics, Creative Chairman and CEO Sim Wong Hoo said, "The digital audio player market represents huge potential; and, with our lower cost structure, we plan to drive this market and capitalize on it."
But according to PC Magazine's senior executive editor Bill Howard, Creative "was slow on the uptake getting into the portable MP3 player market." The first MP3 player, SonicBlue's Rio, appeared in 1998. Creative's chief digital music player rival remains SonicBlue, but Creative faces low-cost competition from other well-known companies such as Compaq, Intel, Iomega, Philips and Samsung.
But Creative is depending on cost-cutting to capture music player marketshare. Taking advantage of the shrinking cost of hard disk storage, Creative lowered the cost of its 6GB Nomad Jukebox player under $300; a no-frills Jukebox (without carrying case or other accessories) costs $269 when ordered online through Creative and has a $299 suggested price from other retailers.
Originally priced at $500 last fall, the Nomad Jukebox is one of the top-selling digital audio players. Comparably priced Flash-based audio players such as the Rio and Intel's Pocket Concert come with much less storage than hard-disk-based players; Flash players offer between 32MB and 128MB of built-in memory at prices ranging from $125 to $300. However, Flash players are smaller and lighter than the portable CD player-sized Nomad Jukebox.
Creative plans to offer a 10GB version of the Jukebox in the fall. Additionally, the company expects to continue lowering the prices on its devices as hard disk prices drop, Creative Director of Marketing Ken Fong recently told Webnoize.
SonicBlue plans to release its first-quarter financial results next Thursday. In February, the company reported a fourth-quarter net loss of $67 million and said it won't become profitable in 2001 like it had previously announced. In recent months, SonicBlue has acquired ReplayTV, Sensory Science and car audio developer Empeg.
Investors talk up voice recognition
April 25, 2001 04:28 PM ET
by J.T. Farley
RELATED STORIES
• Speak clearly and they will follow
• Language comes alive
NEW YORK -- Shares in voice recognition software companies SpeechWorks International (SPWX) and Nuance Communications (NUAN) rose today, despite the fact that both companies issued warnings over the past week and were hit with analyst downgrades.
SpeechWorks ended regular trade up 70 cents, or 5.88 percent at $12.60, while Nuance gained 63 cents, or 5.37 percent to close at $12.37. Both companies are more than 90 percent off their 52-week highs.
Earnings report
After the bell Tuesday, SpeechWorks posted a first-quarter loss of 19 cents a share, a penny narrower than the Thomson Financial/First Call consensus. However, the company warned that its full-year loss could run as high as 80 cents a share, 15 cents higher than analysts' expectations.
SpeechWorks CEO Stuart Patterson said if anything, the warning is a defensive move. "We want to be careful not to assume that we're immune [to the economic slump]… It's risky for any company to assume they can rise right through this particular period," he told Upside.com.
Despite the caution, SpeechWorks saw Q1 revenues double over Q1 2000, and the company landed blue-chip customers such as Microsoft (MSFT) Bank of America (BAC) and Credit Lyonnais. Perhaps most surprisingly, the company said it plans to increase its 380-person staff by as much as 15 percent.
In contrast, Nuance posted a wider than expected loss on April 19 and announced plans to lay off 20 percent of its workers.
But it may be too early for SpeechWorks to claim victory. "I wouldn't say that either [SpeechWorks or Nuance] has a clear lead at all," said Ladenberg Thalmann analyst Donald Newman.
The competition
He notes that it is not a two-horse race, as both these companies are still competing with scandal-plagued, bankrupt Belgian competitor Lernout & Hauspie.
"Lernout is a big player in this market and you can't write it off. It is expected to come out of [bankruptcy] reorganization some time in the fall, and there's no question that it has very good technology and a good management team," Newman said.
So what program does Newman use himself? Voice Express, from none other than Lernout & Hauspie. However, it could be some time before people junk their keyboards en masse and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome goes the way of smallpox.
As Newman notes, "Bill Gates has said that he expects an alternative to the mouse in the next four or five years. We'll see."
Samsung Electronics launching post PC business in full gear
By Yoo, Hyeong-jun
Wednesday, April 25, 2001
Samsung Electronics(chaired by Yoon Jong-yong), which has been inactive in post PC business such as Web pads and personal digital assistants (PDAs), is now launching the business in full gear.
The company has established the Personal Internet Computing Business Division for product development earlier this month, apart from the existing PC Division that has been in charge of the post PC business so far.
The domestic post PC market is expected to rapidly grow in the latter half of this year with large businesses such as Samsung Electronics entering the scene. Venture firms and multinationals have been leading the market.
"We are developing technologies on our own as well as outsourcing from venture firms in a bid to enter the post PC market," said a source from the company. "We plan to market those in-house developed products overseas rather than at home and have introduced a product concept in this regard," he added.
The company plans to launch distribution business for its own Web pad product next month aiming at domestic cyber apartments and to release a PDA this fall. The Window CE based PDA currently under development is designed to deliver a variety of multimedia and communications functions.
HandEra ships a Palm for power users
April 25, 2001
Web posted at: 10:12 a.m. EDT (1412 GMT)
By Cameron Crouch
(IDG) -- Boosting the options for personal digital assistants, the HandEra 330 debuted Monday sporting two expansion slots and a high-resolution display on a device that runs the reliable Palm OS.
Formerly TRG Products, HandEra is announcing the 330 PDA and the company's new name next week. A Palm licensee, TRG Products was the first vendor to add a CompactFlash expansion slot to a Palm OS-based device. The new HandEra 330 takes expansion further, installing a second MultiMedia/Secure Digital slot as well as 2MB of internal Flash memory (for upgrades) and 8MB of internal memory. HandEra also says its 330 is the only Palm-powered device with a quarter VGA screen (240 by 320). The HandEra 330 is scheduled to ship by June, priced at $350.
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Double the Expansion
CompactFlash slots are common among Pocket PC devices, but only HandEra's $249 TRGpro put CF support into a Palm device. Besides CF, the HandEra 330 will support stamp-size MultiMedia cards and Secure Digital cards in its new Secure Digital slot. Palm's new m500 and m505 also support Secure Digital, but HandEra says it independently chose to support SD.
"The addition of an SD slot came from feedback of our TRGpro users," says J. Michael Downey, chair and chief executive of HandEra. "Most of the users purchased the TRGpro for its massive storage and on-device backup in non-volatile data, thanks to the CF slot. With so many input/output add-ons for CF, our users wanted another slot for memory."
HandEra 330 users can also use SD cards with things like software and copyright-protected content. Eventually, I/O SD modules will be able to add Bluetooth, GPS, and modems to the device. Similar modules already exist for Compact Flash and Handspring Visor's Springboard platform. Handspring recently released a thin model, the $399 Visor Edge, which competes with the thin Palm V and m500 series.
Besides expansion options, HandEra's new PDA provides 2MB of Flash memory inside the device, which offers software upgrade possibilities for new versions of the Palm OS. The Flash memory also boosts the device's internal memory from 8MB to 10MB.
Striking Resolution
The HandEra 330 promises a better viewing experience thanks to its QVGA display and noninverting backlight. It provides an optional landscape mode display, which supports documents and even spreadsheets. And you can even collapse the graffiti input area to take advantage of the full display surface.
"The display has a 240 by 320 resolution," Downey says. "The average Palm device has a resolution of 160 by 160, so ours offers roughly double the resolution."
To increase the viewing surface, HandEra converted the graffiti writing area to be software-driven, Downey says. That means when graffiti is not in use, that region collapses so you see a larger window of data.
The HandEra 330 comes with standard Palm OS software as well as the QuickOffice suite, which includes QuickSheet for viewing Excel spreadsheets and QuickWord for Word documents.
"Both of those take advantage of the resolution and larger display surface of the device," Downey says.
Most Palm devices, including TRGpro, produce an inverted image when the backlight is on, making it hard to read the type, Downey says. To improve readability, HandEra adds what it calls a noninverting backlight to the 330 device.
Audio Recorder Built In
For business users, the HandEra 330 includes a voice recorder that accepts dictation. The earlier TRGpro device already had an amplified speaker, so the company added a microphone and digital recorder, Downey says. And because the recorder can record to memory, CompactFlash, or Secure Digital, you're only limited by the size of the card, he says.
At $350, the HandEra 330 is cheaper than Palm's m500 with an SD slot, and has the added benefits of Compact Flash, internal memory, and a large viewing area. However, the HandEra device is also larger than the Palm, and it uses AAA instead of rechargeable lithium ion batteries. The HandEra 330 requires four AAA batteries, double most PDAs, although the company says this doubles its life compared with the Visor Deluxe and the Palm m100 series.
HandEra has yet to release a device with a color display. Both Palm and Handspring offer color devices with expansion slots.
As with the TRGpro, HandEra is targeting corporate technology departments, but also plans to distribute it through business retailers such as Sam's Club and Office Depot, Downey says.
Cell phone makers learn software the hard way
By Ben Charny
Special to CNET News.com
April 24, 2001, 4:00 a.m. PT
Of all the features on the Kyocera Smartphone released last month in the United States, one stood out: a "reboot" button.
Although the smallest thing on the phone, the button is a large sign of the inherent problems that will befall the cellular industry as it crams increasingly sophisticated technology into its products. The reboot button is typically associated with PCs and other computing machinery, a sort of last-resort ejector seat used when complicated software crashes.
Unfortunately, fixing a phone's service isn't as easy as hitting a button. Save for just a handful of people savvy enough to know the difference between CDMA20001xevDO and TDMA, customers are at the mercy of the carrier when things go wrong with a handset. Then there are the myriad software languages used in creating and sending the data--a labyrinth so complex that a single e-mail from one phone to another can travel any of 10,000 paths at any time, some analysts suggest.
"The three-fingered, 'Ctrl-Alt-Delete' solution used to be a joke in the industry," says Michael O'Brien, chief executive of GoAhead Software in Bellevue, Wash., which among other things offers diagnostic services for telephone networks. "I don't think people have even started to address the
Gartner analysts Michael McGuire and Bryan Prohm say stuffing the cell phone with enough features and functions to choke a Thanksgiving turkey is the path to financial indigestion.
In this time when even industry stalwarts Motorola and Nokia are seeing cell phone sales plummet, handset makers are feeling more pressure than ever to find ways to generate revenue and shake out of the telecommunications slump. One answer seems to be to sell mobile phones packed with new features, such as Internet access and other interactive services.
But some in the phone industry worry that these companies, in their rush to sell these steroid-injected phones, are neglecting potentially troubling problems--especially in the relatively unfamiliar realm of software. Already, some services have been offered prematurely, resulting in glitches and even recalls.
Nokia, for example, recently disclosed a software problem that could affect its plans to launch next-generation technology, called "3G." A repair is planned, but the embarrassing episode has raised questions about the software acumen of wireless phone companies and the long-feared problems regarding multiple communications standards, both in the United States and internationally.
The specter of phones becoming overloaded and crashing has loomed particularly large after some handsets using Java technology did just that in Japan last year, resulting in a recall. Phone makers are learning why software, unlike hardware, is subject to a seemingly endless series of fixes, security patches and euphemistic product "upgrades" often issued to do both.
Some software developers think the day will come when phones will need information technology managers, the kind of support staff necessary to maintain large PC networks for employees and customers.
"It would be difficult for a consumer to reprogram his or her phone themselves without the necessary specialized cables and software," cell phone software developer Hugh Blemmings writes in an e-mail.
A casual conversation with another software developer shows why.
Peter Hofmann's "10-minute fix" needs a technical dictionary to understand. He explains that to update your cell phone in Europe, where the standard called GSM is king, phones have a subscriber identity module (SIM), which is used to identify the subscriber to his or her calling network and to encrypt the call's data. Applications that run on the SIM can be updated by the carrier.
The issues are as important as they are seemingly indecipherable. Despite current economic hardships, growth rates of cellular handset sales and wireless Net access are still expected to rise significantly in the coming years.
Nokia said it expects 1 billion people to use cell phones by next year. WR Hambrecht predicts that wireless Internet use will grow from fewer than 1 million subscribers today to more than 10.5 million at the end of next year in the United States alone. Taking a broader view, total worldwide spending on wireless technology and services is expected to rise from $77.5 billion in 2000 to $134 billion in 2004, according to the Telecommunications Industry Association.
Yet a downturn in telecom is taking its toll. Ericsson Friday announced dismal earnings and said it plans to lay off 12,000 employees. Bellwether Nokia also cut forecasts.
Against this precarious industry backdrop, the phone makers themselves are clearly more worried about lifting slumping handset sales than acting upon the concerns of an industry about phone service that hasn't yet been released.
"There will definitely be some design issues as handsets become more complex," Jupiter Research analyst Seamus McAteer said. "With aggregate growth Generation gaps
1G: First-generation phones have come and are all but gone. These phones are only capable of making and receiving voice calls.
2G: Second-generation phones cannot only receive a voice call, but can receive and send pieces of data, like e-mails or Web pages. The voice and data travel from one phone to the next at speeds of 14.4kbps.
3G: Third-generation phones can receive and send both voice and data, but at speeds of about 144kbps, which is similar to what a broadband Internet connection offers PC users.
in the wireless sector slowing and competition heating up, we may well see the slightly premature launch of new services that haven't been adequately tested in the field."
That could spell certain disaster in today's massively complex networks.
Carriers share some networks, or pass off customer coverage to each other. Pieces of a carrier's network, made up of towers and bay stations, are located across the globe. Inside just one of these bay stations is an entire world of computing, with up to 50 applications, four different central processing units and millions of pieces of software.
"We do lots of testing on these phones, we go through all the combinations," said Nokia spokesman Kevin Nowak. "They are pretty crash-resistant. You can never discount the possibility, but outside of computers, very few electronic products crash."
Except for two weeks ago, of course. That's when Nokia admitted that some of the phones they made for the American market wouldn't work on high-speed networks to be launched later this year. The fix? It plans to give U.S. providers Sprint and Verizon a software patch for the problem to load into their own networks.
Verizon had its own proposed solution to the Nokia glitch: Don't sell Nokia phones to its customers--though no decision has been made on that option.
Ericsson took another route and recalled the phones. The company said on Tuesday that it had no other recourse but to withdraw from the market its first shipment of its new GPRS mobile phones because of a flawed factory installation.
More features, more problems
Starting in May, Japanese telephone service provider NTT DoCoMo is expected to launch the world's first service offering customers the next generation of phones capable not only of making telephone calls, but receiving and sending e-mails, patching into a company's computer network or cruising the Internet, all at speeds once only thought possible for personal computers.
But nothing is coming easy. NTT DoCoMo acknowledges it's having difficulties sending the videos and other so-called "rich media" files through the network. It's also worried about running out of the radio waves needed to run the service in five years and has applied to the Japanese government for more.
None of this comes as a shock to Nitin Shan, now general manager and executive vice president at San Jose, Calif.-based ArrayComm. He was one of Lucent Laboratories' first engineers to experiment with the phones of the future in 1995.
When Shah began working with cell phones in 1995, most were only capable of making telephone calls. The second-generation, or 2G, phones started arriving in 1996 and 1997. They are capable of both making telephone calls and receiving bits of data, like e-mails, or a Web page. Third-generation phones, expected to reach Japan in May and the Americas by year's end, are supposed to receive both voice calls and data, but at speeds matching what personal computers connected to the Internet operate at.
At least that's the industry's thinking. Reality has been much different.
Banking on 3G
Telephone companies have latched onto "3G" in the hopes of finding new ways to make money. European telephone companies have spent more than $100 billion on building these high-speed networks and buying the licenses to operate them. American carriers have spent about the same.
The huge expenditures have caught the attention of banks, which are now making it more expensive for telephone companies to get the needed loans to finish the build-outs. Wall Street is also taking notice and investors have been pummeling the entire sector.
With so much riding on these networks, Shah said it's surprising that there isn't much new about them. In fact, most carriers used their existing networks, which were only capable of sending voice calls to and from users, and added hardware to it that lets it handle the streaming videos, e-mails with attachments and other pieces of complicated data that comes with the promise of 3G.
The result, Shah says, is a "lot of legacy," that may force the same carriers hoping to reap billions of dollars in new revenue to scale back next-generation service, or else charge consumers an unattractively high price for it.
"The more that goes out there, the more the networks get congested," he said. "The question is whether you can deliver (information in) a cost-effective way."
CTExpo Best Of Show
By The Editors, Computer Telephony
Apr 5, 2001 (1:29 PM)
URL: http://www.computertelephony.com/article/CTM20010326S0001
Technology trade events, like most technology magazines, are pitched to a specific audience (e.g., call center managers), and cover a specific, narrowly defined subject matter (e.g., call center infrastructure). This has never been true of Expo (nor of Computer Telephony Magazine), since both were founded to evangelize new communications technologies - technologies with very broad, indeed revolutionary, applicability. Our content has always been pitched not to a specific job description or industry segment, but to innovators across the board: elite managers, implementors, manufacturers, channel entities, consultants, service providers empowered to drive technology change.
For this reason, Expo - and CT Magazine, as well - have always embraced the whole spectrum of communications platform components, products, and services, and have distinguished themselves from the mass of topic-focused events and media by communicating with attendees and readers at a higher conceptual level. While other shows and magazines tried to push boxes, we pushed strategy, attitudes, new skills, innovation, business benefits. Ultimately, we pushed the logic of a single infrastructure for all communications applications.
And what do you know? Today, the Internet is the underlying toolkit from which all communications applications derive and with which all applications interoperate; wireless, handheld computers, speech recognition, the web, specialized information appliances, offering a plethora of endpoint and user interface options. The big message - as this year's Expo amply demonstrated - was about convergence: a single infrastructure, a single development effort, a single broadband pipe, driving a multitude of applications and delivery systems.
But the Internet - and the enormous investment in the web and broadband that today's communications applications and services can now leverage as infrastructure - also has changed everything. Not least of which, the pace of development and change. This year's Expo featured a veritable explosion of new or significantly upgraded products - more than 150 brand-new items from over 300 exhibitors. Telephony has learned to leverage Internet tools and development paradigms.
Some of the benefits: Voice portal architectures, mostly driven by the increasingly dominant VoiceXML script language, are set to supersede box-bound IVR and connect phones to web-based transaction processing engines and data sources. Portal providers like VoiceGenie, NetByTel, and TellMe are getting big clients. And companies like VSR are bringing VoiceXML technology down into the realm of CPE communications servers.
Every new phone system and communications server shown at CT Expo 2001 is IP capable: both in terms of trunking, and in terms of remote station support. Remote telephony/ data will be a huge growth area in 2001-2002, as call centers and the enterprise exploit these technologies to lower overhead, retain employees, and gain access to new talent pools.
Big players are entering the xSP/ITSP marketplace. Worldcom was demonstrating its soon-available ASP call center service, privately branded, but clearly based on Telephony@Work's award-winning infrastructure. When carriers at that scale step up to the plate, it rationalizes the whole “rent an app” paradigm. ITSPs for messaging, unified communications, notification, wireless interface, gatekeeper services, and other high- and low-level communications functions were also much in evidence.
With such a plethora of important new products, services, and initiatives, our Editors were hard-pressed to select the best for our traditional - and much-coveted - Best of Show Awards. We were forced to choose more winners than in prior years - still a stringently circumscribed sampling from the over 300 exhibitors present.
3Com Enhances NBX with Call Center Apps
3Com (Santa Clara, CA - 408-326-5000) made two major additions to the NBX family at CT Expo, announcing the NBX Call Center and demonstrating the SuperStack 3 NBX, a denser version of the existing NBX 100 platform. An application running on the LAN-based NBX call control server, the Call Center software performs intelligent call routing, dynamically configured queuing, and real-time monitoring and reports. While the NBX 100 can support up to 200 extensions, and the new Superstack 3 version supports up to 600, NBX Call Center is aimed at smaller user groups, with a sweet spot of 25 agents or below. Easy to configure and manage, the Call Center's basic and advanced features are all exposed through GUIs and drag-n-drop elements. Because it uses 3Com's networked telephony resources as its base, the Call Center works for any user connected to the server via LAN or WAN, through one of 3Com's Ethernet phones. NBX Call Center is the first major application that 3Com has added to the system, while continuing to enhance the NBX itself. Also worthy of note at 3Com: a new line of business IP phones that integrate with Palm Pilot apps over an infrared port.
Aculab Reaps the CTI Whirlwind
Aculab (Milton Keynes, UK - +44-0-1908-27-3839) has decided to compete against Intel/Dialogic's CT Media and Brooktrout's RealComm platform with their new Whirlwind, an ECTF S.100-based high-performance CT server that's offered with no license charge.
Whirlwind allows for multi-platform and mixed platform development, so developers can use CPUs and operating systems appropriate to their needs.
Adomo Launches Mobile Communications Server
Adomo (Cupertino, CA - 408-996-7086) unveiled its first product, the Adomo Mobile Communications Server (MCS), at CT Expo. It grabbed our attention with its elegant approach to mobile messaging. Adomo accurately refers to the MCS as an “appliance” because the system is self-contained and more or less plug-n-play. Encased in a stackable, pizza-box-style server, Adomo MCS is an adjunct to a Microsoft Exchange server, and lets users access any messages or other Exchange information by phone, using text-to-speech and speech recognition. The user navigates menus using speech commands, and can listen to, reply, and compose email messages, calendar entries, or contact information strictly using voice. Unlike some unified messaging systems with similar capabilities, no complex integration with Exchange or with the phone system is required. You simply plug the MCS box into a LAN and it establishes direct communication with Exchange, while leaving all messages and other user data on the Exchange server itself. This “stateless” system architecture makes the MCS easy to set up and manage, and virtually eliminates any extra cost beyond the low upfront list price. The MCS comes in 12-port and T1 configurations.
Advantech's 1U cPCI Rackmount
The space-efficient “pizza box” has come to the world of CompactPCI. Advantech (San Diego, CA - 858-623-0838) debuted at CT Expo the MIC-3035, a 1U-high, slim rugged enclosure that contains a clever two-slot (one system slot and one peripheral slot) 6U cPCI backplane. The MIC-3035 can hold up to four devices, including a slim floppy drive, CD-ROM, and two 3.5-inch hard drives. A 150 Watt ATX power supply (AC or DC) drives the system, which is cooled by four 10.5 CFM cooling fans. Another version, the MIC-3377/M, holds a single-slot 6U cPCI single-board computer with VGA and dual LANs.
AFC's PremMax IAD
Advanced Fibre Communications (Petaluma, CA - 707-794-7700) made its name in digital loop carriers, the above-ground, outside-plant cabinets that aggregate and multiplex local loop analog into digital lines for connection to the CO's main distribution frame. They're taking that application to the broadband multitenant-unit (MTU) market with the PremMax, an Integrated Access Device that combines the functions of a channel bank, local switch, router, CSU/DSU, and multiplexer. It can also work in front of a PBX.
Pitched to ILECs, CLECs, building LECs and enterprises, the PremMax converges narrowband voice and broadband data networks at the enterprise and provides remote diagnostics and management (via embedded web server, SNMP, command-line interface, FTP and Telnet). It can allocate bandwidth by DSO. At the CO or in the building basement, AFC's partner product, the AccessMAX Integrated Multiservice Access Platform, aggregates voice for the Class 5 switch and forwards it using GR-303 signalling, and grooms data traffic onto the ATM, IP, or frame relay data network, eliminating the need for a separate digital cross connect system. It provides up to 32 FXS voice ports and four T1s or E1s; a module swap adapts the CPE to DSL.
AG Communications Takes Centrex to the Next Level
Lucent subsidiary AG Communications (Phoenix, AZ - 888-888-2427) is updating Centrex's image with its iMerge Centrex Feature Gateway and, more recently, its ClientCare Call Center Deluxe Edition. iMerge is essentially a VoIP gateway that works with a Class 5 switch to extend the Centrex feature set across an IP network in the local loop. Simply using IP as a delivery mechanism helps overcome many of the traditional limitations associated with Centrex service, particularly those of geographical boundaries. With iMerge, for instance, branch office workers and telecommuters can access the same Centrex features as users at a central site, regardless of their proximity to a common local exchange switch. ClientCare is a complete, network-based call center application built for this same environment. ClientCare can interface directly to both a Class 5 switch and the IP network, and routes calls to agents in any location, over any transport mechanism. Like iMerge, one of the main advantages of ClientCare is that it supports a distributed enterprise, treating multiple offices and teleworker connections under a single, logical routing scheme. The system also offers a great set of features, including IVR, skills-based routing, screen pops, and blended inbound/outbound capabilities.
Alliance Systems' I-Series 9000
Of the many 19-inch rackmount comm servers offered by Alliance Systems (Plano, TX - 972-633-3400), the new 9U I-Series 9000 is perhaps the most versatile, poised between the mammoth I-Series 11000 and the much smaller I-Series 5000. The 9000 is designed for networks, medium-sized contact centers, PBXs, and ASPs. It can hold eight 5.25-inch drives and is unique among the I-Series for offering not two but three auto-switched, hot-swap, dual-lead, load-sharing power supplies (110/220VAC or -48VDC).
The I-Series 9000 backplanes support combinations of up to 20 ISA/PCI slots. It's cooled by three 140 CFM fans that can be removed from the front of the enclosure. OS support includes Windows NT, 2000, UNIX or Linux.
AltiGen's AltiServ 4.0 Call Center
AltiGen Communications (Fremont, CA - 510-252-9712) wowed us with the enhanced contact center features of their AltiServ 4.0 platform, released late last year. Aimed at medium-sized service businesses, AltiServ 4.0 provides full PC PBX phone system functionality, driving analog or IP telephones locally or remotely. Now it can serve the needs of an internal or external, formal or informal contact center, as well. The contact center features are a cut above the kind of basic call queuing normally available on good-quality PC PBXs. One AltiServ can handle calls for up to 128 agents, with a maximum of 64 agents in a workgroup (sales, customer service, tech support, etc.). A head-end auto-attendant handles group selection, then plays on-hold music/messages while they await assistance. Simple, PC-based configuration and management interfaces let even a non-call-center specialist set up and assign agents to workgroups, control messaging on multiple queues, monitor and whisper-coach agents, and track overall call center, workgroup, and agent performance. A similar, though less-intrusive agent interface presents agents with current-call detail, as well as cumulative performance stats. The interface can easily share a desktop with back-end and web-based scripting, wrap-up, and other tools.
The AltiServ may be a good choice for companies prioritizing Internet-based commerce and wishing to enable remote-workers. Click-to-call and co-browsing are supported by AltiGen's AltiWeb component. Enhanced IP gateway functions let remote agents - equipped with a laptop with Quicknet IP telephony board or with one of Siemens' new IP telephones - log on and serve customers from anywhere.
This is quite a serious contact center solution - and AltiGen is committed to making it very affordable; especially attractive to current customers. The contact center feature set, including web-contact enhancements, can run on an existing 4.0 platform for an estimated $6,000.
AltiGen and Flextel's Enhanced IP PBX Platform
For years, AltiGen Communications (Fremont, CA - 510-252-9712) has been known for its popular small- and medium-sized PC-based phone systems. At CT Expo, AltiGen took a leap forward, thanks in large measure to an amazing new hardware platform provided by the Italian Flextel SpA (San Jose, CA - 408-298-8587, www.flextel.it). Both AltiGen and Flextel announced the release of the ctiMultiVision 1200 series chassis, designed specifically for AltiGen's OE 4.0 IP-Business Telephone System.
The ctiMultiVision 1200 can host up to 22 AltiGen PCI Triton cards, creating a telephone system with 192 analog extensions and multiple T1/E1 and VoIP channels. Five configurations range from three to 12 slots and from 24 to 192 extensions, allowing for considerable customization. Two of the configurations are multi-session, allowing multiple systems to independently run on a single platform. Although the systems are independent, they have a higher level of redundancy because backup CPUs can be shared.
Best: You can mix PCI, ISA, and CompactPCI boards in the same chassis! You can take your old AltiGen Trident boards and move them into a new system having high-density functionality provided by new-generation cPCI boards.
Amoeba Telecom's CTAP Analyzes and Manages Traffic
Amoeba Telecom (Coimbatore, India - 91(422) 311645) was showing their impressive Convergence Traffic Analysis Platform (CTAP), a distributed data-acquisition and analysis system for real-time traffic management on converged multi-application networks - for example, on complex ITSP networks serving multiple customers. Data is acquired by remote probes and installed transparently at significant network nodes. The probes record traffic in bulk and perform progressive analysis, submitting results to a CTA Server component (running on a fast NT machine), installed within each network segment. The server - or, in real-world implementations, the network of servers - does the heavy lifting of packet sniffing, filtering, protocol validation, etc., in different modes; maintains the statistical database; and runs real-time heuristics for automatic data analysis and alarming. Servers are collectively controlled by CTA clients, which can be anywhere in the network.
The analysis system runs across all seven layers of the OSI stack (server and application protocols like HTTP, IMAP, FTP, POP3; all the way down to link-layer Ethernet), and can be enhanced with additional plug-in analysis and certification modules on an as-needed basis. The user interface is highly customizable, and XML and text-file output makes raw and cooked data available to other applications. A sophisticated VQ-Metrics component focuses on QoS-related statistical analysis and SLA compliance, and can produce customer-specific reports.
Amtelco's XDS H.100 MC-3 UltraLite Board
Amtelco (McFarland, WI - 608-838-4194) has solved the problem of application scale, connecting up to five chassis without sophisticated hardware overkill or exotic switching fabrics. The solution, shown at CT Expo, is the new XDS Infinity Series H.100 PCI MC-3 UltraLite board. The UltraLite provides fully dynamic time-slot switching from one chassis to another. Board-to-application communication is carried through dual-ported RAM.
The board's multi-chassis bus includes a total of 2,423 time-slots, allowing up to 1,211 full duplex connections between either local or off-site locations. The board uses an OC3 fiber-optic ring to connect between two and five chassis, which can be up to 2,000 meters apart. Driver support for Windows 2000, NT, Unixware, SCO Unix, and Linux is available. The UltraLite board is compatible with other XDS and H.100 compliant products, and it will even work with MVIP or SCSA boards with an XDS H.100-to-MVIP or H.100-to-SCSA interface connection.
Anyuser.com's Gatekeeper Service for ITSPs and Businesses
Anyuser.com (Cerritos, CA - 562-865-2666) has a well-rounded suite of services for consumers and businesses looking to do IP telephony. They also support channel partners (e.g., ITSPs) looking for a structured, turnkey IP telephony offering with global connectivity; as well as telcos looking to provide “IP Centrex.” Anyuser provides H.323 gatekeeper/softswitch feature service, online IP device number-registration, translation and routing services, billing and online bill-presentment, yellow pages and voice services, and other IP-side services to telcos, ITSPs, enterprises and consumers, on an ASP basis. They work with partners to provide managed bandwidth between endpoints, and coordinate gateway handoff facilities in local calling areas.
Other partners supply IP telephones and appliances, plus hardware for implementing IP telephony behind HomePNA and similar network types. There's no aspect of the IP telephony equation these folks haven't got a structured answer for. And they know how to run an IP telephony network, too - we tested their network in several different topologies (IP phone to IP phone, IP phone to PSTN phone, PSTN-to-IP-to-PSTN, etc.) and can well believe their claims of MOS quality scores of 3.9 and better (regular PSTN is 4.0).
APPRO Squeezes Storage, Processing Power
APPRO International (Milpitas, CA - 408-941-8100) has somehow managed to take the storage and processing power normally found in a 4U-high, 19-inch rackmount and squeeze it down into their APRE-2003HX-1 2U server. APPRO took the lead at the dawn of the “pizza box” era and they continue to surprise us with their ingenious designs.
The APRE-2003HX-1 sports dual 1GHz Pentium III CPUs, a 400 Watt redundant hot-swappable power supply, and a hot-swappable SCSI hard drive back panel plane supporting up to six devices, each with up to a 160 MBps transfer rate. An internal riser card supports up to four full-length, 64-bit, 33 MHz PCI cards. Supports include Red Hat Linux, Windows NT Server 4.0, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows 2000 Advance Server.
Apropos Unlocks the Interaction Vault
Apropos (Oakbrook Terrace, IL - 630-472-9600) took the wraps off its Interaction Vault at the show, giving us a new angle on the much-vaunted 360-degree view of the customer. With iVault, every interaction with a customer is archived. Thereafter, extensive search capabilities allow contact center agents and supervisors to immediately view the entire history of any interaction based on date, time, or business data. It's the perfect thing for companies not sold on the expense of high-end CRM solutions, that nevertheless want to be able to keep tabs on what they've been telling their customers. The iVault, which is browser-based, is part of Apropos' larger Multimedia Interaction Suite.
APW's 21-Slot StealthBridge
Pushing CompactPCI engineering to the limit, APW Electronic Solutions (Milwaukee, WI - 262-523-7600) showed off their StealthBridge, a new bus bridging method of cPCI that allows backplanes to be populated with lots of cPCI plug-in boards and I/O expansion cards. Why “StealthBridge?” Because of its electronically “invisible” design. With a StealthBridge backplane, a single 19-inch subrack can contain 21 cPCI cards and a full complement of rear-mounted I/O transition cards - a gain of two or more slots per system. This may not sound like much until you realize that two slots could mean eight more T1 lines or 256 full duplex phone lines.
When using a 66 MHz cPCI bus (instead of a typical 33 MHz bus) the gain in slots is more significant, because till now there's been a five-slot limit at this speed. On a StealthBridge backplane, however, a full 21 slots can be achieved using multiple bridges.
Aravox's Chink in the VOIP Firewall
Aravox's (Arden Hills, MN - 651-256-2700) VoiceShield solves the problem that stops a lot of VoIP clients cold in enterprise environments: firewalls that halt all streaming media. Usually, using a VoIP client from a firewall-protected network requires a port to be opened for an indeterminate period, leaving the firewall riddled with holes and the network exposed. VoiceShield dynamically opens and closes ports on a per-call basis under control of the gatekeeper, proxy server, or softswitch.
VoiceShield consists of a high-performance firewall and dynamic NAT, and acts as a Layer Four switch, sorting emails and ftp traffic (then routed to traditional firewalls) from voice. Their own packet control language, plus hardware acceleration, manages this trick without imposing unacceptable latency on voice streams. They are deployed at the major carrier Level 3, and are expanding their pitch from carriers to enterprises.
AudioCodes' Media Processing to Enhance VoIP Networks
AudioCodes (San Jose, CA - 408-577-0488) which has gained the largest single share of the VoIP compression-and-packetization market in its gateway chips, modules, and boards, is now going after the media processing piece of the puzzle with the IPMedia launch. First in this series, announced for beta at CT Expo, is the IPM128-cPCI media processing board. Supporting TDM T1s and IP traffic feature for feature, it makes voice processing available to all ports at once. So carriers can implement an IPMedia-based voice server before, during, or after a migration to IP, and use it all the while to support all the popular enhanced services, from call recording, conferencing, and unified messaging to conferencing and IVR.
The IPM128 supports 128 channels of media processing: The basic configuration includes dual 100-based packet interface and H.110 for TDM-based NICs. IPMedia boards can be controlled locally through a host application or over the net using the IP-based API. Providers can connect an IPMedia-based platform to the PSTN through an AudioCodes media gateway. Partnerships with middleware vendors permit integration and aggregation of multiple media applications with the single-board platform.
Axiom's 3-in-1U Internet Server
Question: How do you fit three PCs into a 19-inch wide rackmount space that's 1U in height? Answer: Make them so small that they can fit side by side. Axiom (City of Industry, CA - 626-581-3232) has done just that with their AX6113 3-in-1U Internet Server, fitting 126 separate systems in a standard seven-foot rack. Each little system, not much bigger than a brick, has a thumbscrew design for tool-free entry. Each unit runs on a Pentium III “flip chip” with a 133 MHz front side bus. One 168-pin DIMM socket holds up to 512 MB of SDRAM.
Two bus mastering ATA-33/66 EIDE channels allow for a total of four devices. One 3.5-inch drive bay is provided for IDE, along with one slim-line CD-ROM. There are two USB connectors, and the usual I/O ports for serial, parallel, and 10/100BaseT Ethernet.
Blue Silicon is a UC ASP
Blue Silicon (San Jose, CA - 408-954-8000) is a Unified Communications ASP for enterprise clients. They install a remote-managed IVR box at your premise and integrate it with your PBX on spare analog or digital line ports (over 90 PBXs are supported, plus Centrex, and new integrations are easy to develop). The box does the heavy lifting associated with the voice part of auto-attendant/voicemail in a legacy telephony environment: It answers calls, plays menus, records messages, signals the switch to transfer calls, etc. Messages are then passed over an IP pipe to an LDAP-compatible message store at Blue Silicon's facility. This message store is also populated by inbound integrations to email, by inbound faxes sent to your private Blue Silicon fax number, etc., and served by infrastructure for outbound notification, paging, wireless device connection, and web. Upshot: You get enterprise-class (as opposed to web-based, Net-only “consumer class”) integrated voice, fax, and email messaging without the pain of owning and managing UM CPE and an integrated message store. You can access your messages from anywhere, on a range of devices. And you can pay for it by the month (traffic-based schemes are also available).
Brooktrout Holds All Calls
Although Brooktrout's (Needham, MA - 781-449-4100) TR1000 is not a new product, we think a media server that can handle 3.8 million calls per hour deserves a Best of Show award. The TRxStream TR1000 is targeted to service providers (Lucent Technologies uses it) and other “heavy-hitters,” and at CT Expo, demonstrated its capacity to deliver. With a dual T3 (1,344 ports) system in a single CompactPCI shelf, it processed 3.8 million calls per hour, while using only 38% of the CPU's capacity. And although call density is an important feature for SPs, it can't overshadow the importance of reliability. The TR1000 passed this test, too, running at high-call-density levels for two consecutive weeks without system resets or operator intervention. Check out the white paper posted on Brooktrout's website for detailed test results. The TR 1000 supports from 24 to 96 simultaneous voice sessions, and up to eight sessions of intelligent fax. It runs on PCI or cPCI. And Brooktrout is partnering with Nuance to deliver speech recognition in second quarter of this year.
Cisco Turns Heads with Turnkey CTI Suite
Building on its IP Contact Center and Intelligent Contact Management platforms, Cisco (San Jose, CA - 408-526-7208) released the Turnkey CTI Suite at this Spring's CT Expo, adding an important component to its product line and signaling a greater focus on small- and medium-sized call centers. According to Cisco, the majority of demand for CTI capabilities is among call centers with 40 to 100 agents. With Turnkey CTI, Cisco offers this market a set of off-the-shelf desktop apps like screen pops, workflow automation, and soft phone capabilities, and also supplies development and integration tools at both the desktop and the server levels. They're working with CRM vendors, in particular, to deploy their products over Cisco's network-based call routing platform, the ICM.
The CTI suite's client and server modules fit seamlessly with contact centers built on Cisco's IPCC model - which includes intelligent routing, IVR, and IP-based call switching - but also works with legacy ACD and call center systems. With the Turnkey CTI Suite, Cisco solidifies its position in the contact center market, and extends its capabilities from the core of the enterprise network to the agents' and administrators' desktops.
CityNet's HomePNA Solutions for Hotels/MCUs/BLECs/SPs
HomePNA is the hot new multi-vendor standard for medium-speed data networking over standard, two-conductor twisted pair wiring. Because it's back-compatible with existing building and residential phone cabling, it's likely to play an important role in provider plans for wiring up hotels, apartment complexes, institutions, small business facilities, and homes. CityNet Telecommunications (Monrovia, CA - 626-599-8556) is ready to connect you to HomePNA - offering a range of well-engineered, scalable, rack switching gear; small port-count local hubs; and individual device interfaces for PCs, phones, and other equipment.
A single 1412 rack unit (one of many products they offer) accepts up to three 100BaseT network connections, and serves up to 12 homes or offices with HomePNA data service at close to 1 Mbps. Regular 1412 units can be daisy chained on the fourth 100BaseT network interface, and slaved to a 1412M management unit (another 12 ports, plus additional brains) for central monitoring and remote configuration down to the port level, using a web client. Interconnection with telco wiring is simple: Just punch down pairs from the device to pairs at the demarc - the electrical connection is transparent to the serving telco. They say wiring a typical hotel, with several hundred units, only takes a few hours. Upstairs in the office suite, multiport Ethernet hubs and individual device interfaces pull the HomePNA data off the phone wiring and translate it to standard Ethernet. Your standard telephone equipment, meanwhile, is completely blind to the whole affair.
Clearcube's C/Port
ClearCube (Austin, TX - 888-266-8115) shook up the world of call center hardware management with their C3 architecture, which allows standard Cat 5 wire to carry a mixture of video, audio, keystrokes, and mouse click signals from the desktop to a ClearCube Blade (shoebox-sized computer) up to 200 meters (656 feet) away.
At CT Expo 2001, ClearCube unveiled their C/Port, which now allows serial information to travel 200 meters, too. You can now sync up with your Palm Pilot from your workstation, even though your computer is sitting in a rack with 96 or so others.
CML Versatel's TotalAgility Maximizes Voice Resources
CML Versatel's (Hull, QU, Canada - 819-771-0011) TotalAgility Platform is a programmable switch that employs a unique architecture to achieve higher density and greater utilization of DSP resources than most systems of its kind. CML's core hardware component is the Sweet16 T1 card, a CompactPCI card that supports up to 16 T1s, and contains on-board DSP resources for functions like conferencing, tone generation, and tone detection. Up to eleven Sweet16s (4,096 ports) can be packed into a single chassis with a total system density reaching upwards of 64,000 ports, by networking chassis together. TotalAgility Mesoware, a middleware layer, mediates between the hardware resources and the CTI applications designed to run on top of TotalAgility. Mesoware exposes the hardware, signaling, and call control through standard, open APIs like TAPI and VERSIT, and also offers links to management and configuration systems via SNMP and SQL. TotalAgility distinguishes itself by separating T1 network interfaces from the underlying DSP resources, and allowing each to act as resource pools. Incoming calls are aggregated over a common and fixed number of T1s, which in turn connect to the DSPs to access media processing resources. DSPs can be added without necessarily adding more network interfaces. In its next generation of products, CML plans an even more attractive proposition by moving media functions onto host processors, and connecting all hardware and software components across IP with fast Ethernet links.
Commetrex' Marriage of T.30 and T.38
A surprising number of ISPs and developers have difficulty building terminating-fax service platforms for IP networks. Circuit-switched providers have long implemented multi-line fax boards running the T.30 terminating-fax protocol, while in the IP world the T.38 real-time IP fax relay protocol is found on embedded resources in PSTN-IP gateways. But in a fully converged network, there's a need to efficiently combine the previously separate functions of the gateway and the service platform node, creating a need for terminating faxes to and from an IP network.
To solve this problem, Commetrex (Norcross, GA - 770-449-7775) announced “the newlyweds,” a successful integration of both T.30 and T.38. It can run on whatever embedded resource is present in a system or directly on the gateway-service platform's host. Indeed, Commetrex told us that they think the host processor is, in many ways, better suited to handle the processing needs of both of these protocols.
Connected Systems' iConnectMail ties PBX to Outsourced Service
IConnectMail, from Connected Systems (Santa Barbara, CA - 805-962-5066) is a solid-state “lite” unified messaging appliance for SMBs. With included auto attendant, it's given voice “brick”-based products some competition, but Connected Systems wants to double or triple the threat. They hope to do this by hooking up their CPE box to OpenWave's (formerly software.com's) IP-enabled ASP unified messaging offering. Because media storage, as well as LDAP interface and SMTP mail store is now on the service provider side, Dwight Buck, CEO, likes to call the system a “Cable TV setup box for a PBX.” The voice- and email message integration is still presented through an MS Exchange GUI. An ISP, for example, can now provision UM without investing in voice resources on the network side.
Looking ahead a little, consider that you now have a little SMB-sized VRU sitting off a PBX station side, and an Ethernet IP connection to the provider. This means you have the means for all sorts of switch-integrated applications, including (with the PBX-Link digital station-set emulator that Connected Systems acquired from Calista) out-of-band desktop call control and ASP- or LAN-supplied screen pop! The service-provider proposition calls for equipping subscribers the with the iConnectMail platform; $3,295 for four ports, serves up to 75 users, says Buck. It has a canned library of 150 PBXes and can “learn” DTMF signaling of others.
Crystal Group Patrols with DarkSite
Crystal Group (Hiawatha, IA - 319-378-1636) unveiled a versatile remote management appliance for servers called DarkSite. DarkSite can monitor the health of servers and notify you of potential problems before they cause an application to fail. DarkSite lets you choose which hardware and software systems (CPUs, RAM, disk drives, network connections, etc.) to monitor and how users will be notified (email, wireless alert messages to a PDA, pager, or cellular phone). DarkSite can send SNMP trap signaling as well.
DarkSite is actually a complete embedded computer system, with its own OS and Crystal's own server management software application. It runs independently from the host system. Interestingly, it has an ISA bus connector on the top and a PCI bus connector on the bottom, so by flipping it, you can insert the card in either type of PC. It runs under Windows 95/98, NT 4.0, Linux, Solaris x86, and SCO (Calera) UnixWare 7.x.
CSS Labs' ProARRAY 2
CSS Labs (Irvine, CA - 949-852-8161), masters of high-density storage, have scored another hit with their new ProARRAY 2 RAID storage subsystem, a 4U, 19-inch rackmount that holds 15 1-inch-high hot-swappable SCA2 SCSI drives (each having a transfer rate of up to 160 MBps). The drives can be configured as one array or three 5-bay modules, each with a single connecting backplane consisting of five 80-pin connectors. Total storage capacity: an incredible 1.1 terabytes.
Three internal hot-swap chassis fans keep the ProARRAY 2 cool. The system is powered by dual redundant, hot-swappable, 250 Watt, auto-sensing power supplies in an ATX PS/2 form factor.
Dialogic/Intel's Converged Communications Platform (ICCP) and CT Media Middleware
Dialogic/Intel (Parsippany, NJ - 973-993-3000) used this year's show to unveil the ICCP, a switch and media processor in one productized platform. Standards-based and open, the Intel Converged Communications Platform (ICCP) lets ISVs build applications that can be deployed on either circuit-switched or IP networks - or both. The biggest pitch: consolidating applications from multiple vendors, such as unified messaging and voice-activated dialers, onto a single system with pooled telephony resources. Thus, small- to medium-sized businesses can now rapidly upgrade and/or expand their communications infrastructure whenever the need arises.
The ICCP runs the new version 2.1 of Dialogic CT Media middleware. Dialogic offers both the CT Media 2.1 Software Development Kit and Resource Development Kit (RDK) at no charge.
DSG's InterPBX does MGCP/SIP
Thank you! About time somebody came out with an IP PBX based around a SIP proxy server. DSG Technology (Walnut, CA - 909-595-8908) looks to be first-to-market with their MGCP/SIP-based, distributed IP PBX/Gateway architecture and complementary (and beautifully designed) MGCP/SIP phones. Multi-location enterprises (and perhaps some ASPs) will warm to DSG's NeuralServer architecture, in which a network of InterPBX proxies cooperate to deliver service transparently to endpoints, and provide software-level failover and traffic rerouting in the event of individual server failure. The basic proxy, called InterSwitch, runs on an NT or Linux box. It cooperates with low-to-high density gateways (IP 1000-3000) for PSTN handoff. DSG makes a superior key telephone for the system (InterPhone), plus an IP-base-station-to-wireless handset version, a softphone, and a PC VoIP adapter as well. Analog adapters hook up your legacy phones. There's even a soft attendant console.
Elix' OPUS Maestro 2000 is S.100 Compatible
Elix (Nuns' Island, QU, Canada - 514-768-1000) - the Mediasoft/Prima fusion - showed the latest version of OPUS Maestro; demonstrating compatibility of the 2000 edition with S.100 R2 servers such as CT Media and Brooktrout's RealComm 100. Applications composed with OPUS Maestro 2000 can now be compiled to run on Intel/Dialogic or Brooktrout hardware platforms. The few adjustments necessary are handled mostly by #IFDEFs in header files. Other enhancements to the platform include Windows 2000 support, and a new version for Windows NT4. Support for Nuance revision 7.0 speech recognition and revision 2.0 voice verification are also now available. OPUS Maestro 2000 is priced at around $400 (U.S.) per port, and is available now.
ELMA's CPCI Chassis Under the SUN
Elma Electronic (Fremont, CA - 510-656-3400) was showing off its new three-slot CompactPCI 19-inch chassis for the SUN OS and processor. To give the unit a low stacking profile, the system accepts 6U cPCI boards horizontally. The system can be powered by SUN CP1400 or CP1500 SBCs, and has such hot-pluggable features as two fans, dual SCSI drives housed in SUN-compatible drive carriers, and dual 150W redundant power supplies.
Unlike most other NEBS-compliant cPCI chassis, Elma's cooling system uses two 50 CFM fans sitting at the front and rear. An optional monitoring system for DC voltages, fan failure, and temperature conditions is available. Best of all, this fault-resilient system is priced under $2,000.
Ericsson's Solidus eCare: Customer Contact for the Mobile Enterprise
Ericsson Enterprise (Menlo Park, CA - 324-6100) has made a number of important enhancements and additions to its product line recently, but perhaps none as significant as the release of Solidus eCare, a customer contact center platform with integrated VoIP and web capabilities. Solidus works in both legacy voice environments as well as on next-gen, IP-based networks, uniting multiple different, and previously disparate, communications channels into a single interface. Skills-based and customer profile-based routing is applied regardless of medium, and all client interfaces support remote workers.
Ericsson already has customers deploying the software in a variety of modes. Solidus eCare becomes particularly powerful when seen in context of other developments within Ericsson Enterprise. At CT Expo, for instance, the company showed its new line of IP phones, the Dialog 3413, along with a new release of its MD110 PBX, which now supports both VoIP and wireless integration.
Exacom Lends EARS to Desktop Voice Recording
Exacom (Concord, NH - 603-228-0706) played a new and different trick in the call recording niche by pushing the process to the edge of the network. With its EXACOM Archival Recording System (that's EARS, for your acronym fanciers), the company has introduced the concept of “point of recording” solutions for multi-site customers. Got reps spread out in onesies and twosies? Put a device about the size of a notebook computer's external drive under their desks, plug it serially into the phone line, and likewise into the existing desktop network connection. (The two RJ-45s in the back of the unit are actually an Ethernet hub, so this “pass-through” trick works and you don't have to add a second Ethernet drop.) The unit records 10 GB of voice and FTPs it up to your central recording system (from Exacom or others) at intervals you determine - complete with load management to avoid overwhelming your anemic branch-office Internet connection.
Eyretel's Replay Studio Speaks Volumes Graphically
Eyretel (Surrey, U.K.: - 44-870-6000-626, U.S.: 301-586-1900) brings data analytics to the call recording industry with its new Replay Studio. Loudly colored graphs show each call coded by type (request for info, customer complaint, product line, and so on) and arranged on a grid by length. Look at one of these displays, though, and suddenly you notice that Sally handles old product calls very quickly, whereas everyone else takes forever. The picture doesn't give you everything you want to know (maybe Sally's brilliant, or maybe she transfers the calls to other reps because she knows nothing about the old products), but you can drill down on any call, listen to the archived recording, and take it from there.
Genesys Makes Contact: G6 Internet Contact
Genesys (San Francisco, CA - 415-437-1100) made a splash last fall announcing Version 6 of its G6 complete contact center suite, and has since backed up its claims with individual product releases. The company rounded out G6 with the release of Internet Contact 6.0, one of the platform's most crucial components, at this year's CT Expo. Internet Contact applies Genesys' Universal Queue model to multiple incoming media, including email, chat, web callback, and VoIP. New features in G6 more tightly integrate these various channels. For example, agents can now handle multiple chat sessions simultaneously, and also “transfer” a live chat session, along with customer data, to other agents or supervisors. G6 Internet Contact has also added web-based forms as a new interaction type, and a way to cut down on email traffic in the contact center. By structuring customer input data up front, and applying standard skills-based routing and queuing methods, web forms can be handled more quickly and efficiently than email. G6 also includes enhanced agent/customer collaboration features, like co-browsing and forms sharing, to assist in e-commerce transactions.
Gold Systems Hooks IVR to Web Apps
Gold Systems' (Boulder, CO - 303-447-2774) Vonetix 2.1 offers a valuable service - hooking IVR platforms to the preexisting business logic of web applications, instead of writing the voice application from scratch. Vonetix 2.1 relies on Java-based architecture, with XML/HTML/ XHTML connectivity for the web and a JDBC plug-in for database systems such as Oracle, Sybase, IBM DB2, and the MS SQL server. A WAP plug-in enables alert messages. Future plans include plug-ins for ERP and CRM packages. The future speech channel will link speech recognition technologies. Its application channel, also in the works, will support VoiceXML and an application creation API in Java. Vonetix 2.1 ships standard on Avaya's Conversant IVR platform, and Cisco is next.
Vonetix capabilities will be further expanded through a full suite of popular connectivity plug-ins to support standards such as CORBA and .NET, as well as enterprise software packages such as Siebel, PeopleSoft, and SAP.
iAmigo's Turnkey Notification Server
Notification - by beeper, wireless, phone call, email, etc. - will drive the next big wave in e-commerce and mobile commerce. It's a necessary technology for all sorts of applications - from stock trading to device management. Proactive notification systems eliminate the need to “call in and check status,” so reduce call center and website traffic.
When linked to transaction processing, notification can even stimulate sales.
The thing is - people want to be notified on all sorts of devices, connected to all sorts of networks. But application makers don't want to master all these technologies to offer a comprehensive set of notification options. Enter iAmigo (Reston, VA - 703-476-4990), and their turnkey notification server. Running NT or Unix (Solaris, HP-UX, SCO), the notification server accepts Notification Markup Language input from applications, presents it to an input parser, subjects the semantically normalized input to processing by an application template (coded in VoiceXML and iAmigo's own XML extension scripting language), then passes it off to one of a clutch of VRU, WAP, and client application servers, for delivery to a client's preferred endpoint device. Returned results (obtainable from WAP or VRU apps) are renormalized and returned to the calling application. The notification server can access databases to derive client profiles, preferences, and device data, and will populate databases to produce statistics and transaction reports.
IBM's WebSphere Voice Server; Works with Dialogic Portal
IBM (White Plains, NY - 800-825-5263) has broken some important new ground with the development of the WebSphere Voice Server, and its newly announced integration with the Dialogic voice portal architecture represents a major step forward for the industry. WebSphere Voice Server offers developers a more standardized and flexible environment in which to integrate web content with telephony infrastructure. Using technologies such as speech recognition, for example, businesses can begin to expose web-based content to customers over the phone, as an enhancement to traditional IVR systems.
Already, IBM has integrated WebSphere Voice Server with its own existing IVR platform, Direct Talk, and with a series of Cisco gateways for VoIP environments. Voice portals, which seek to bring the web and the telephone closer together as channels into businesses' data and applications, simply extend this idea, and are being implemented both by service providers and enterprises themselves. The Dialogic Voice Portal provides a reference architecture, based on the company's own telephony hardware, for building voice portals. IBM's product lets developers program speech applications on top of this architecture using VoiceXML (includes a standards-compliant VoiceXML interpreter) and Java, rather than working directly with the Dialogic APIs.
And on the web side, IBM offers similarly tight integration through its WebSphere application server, using it to host VoiceXML sites or to perform the application's business logic independently of presentation method. Yet another product in this family that caught our attention at CT Expo was the new WebSphere Translation Server, which automatically translates chats (as well as emails or entire web pages) on-the-fly, in multiple languages.
I-BUS/PHOENIX' IBC 2602 Peripheral Master CPU Board
Need to corral the processing power of seven CPU boards into a single CompactPCI system? At CT Expo, I-Bus/Phoenix (San Diego, CA - 858-503-3000) offered the new IBC 2602, 6U Single-Slot cPCI Peripheral Master CPU board. Through an Intel 21554 non-transparent bridge, the IBC 2602 can be used as a peripheral master board, allowing up to seven IBC 2602's to sit in a CompactPCI system (I-Bus/Phoenix makes these too).
The IBC 2602 can hold Mobile Intel Pentium III processors running up to 700 MHz. Up to 512 MB of SDRAM and 128 MB of CompactFlash can also be placed on board. There's also dual 10/100BaseTX Ethernet, PMC expansion (to accommodate such things as Ultra-SCSI or Fiber Channel), and AGP Video.
IBM's WebSphere Voice Server Wins CT Expo Best Of Show
Award-Winning Product Uses VoiceXML And IBM ViaVoice Technology To Provide Easy Phone Access To Information Around The Clock
Read the article in Computer Telephony
INTERNET WIRE -- Computer Telephony magazine today announced that IBM's (NYSE: IBM - news) WebSphere Voice Server with ViaVoice Technology was named "Best of Show" at CT Expo, a major industry conference and trade show held in Los Angeles, March 6-8.
IBM WebSphere Voice Server provides developers with an easy-to-use, flexible interface based on industry standards to create applications that can enable voice access to information around the clock. WebSphere is Internet infrastructure software, middleware that enables businesses to develop, host, run and integrate e-business applications. WebSphere Voice Server is available for IBM DirectTalk, Cisco's VoIP gateways, and the recently announced Dialogic voice portal platform.
"WebSphere Voice Server opens up the Web beyond the PC to anyone with a phone," said Sunil Soares, program director, IBM Voice Systems. "Using IBM ViaVoice technology, it allows callers to interact with the Web -- virtually any database -- using natural human speech. Through industry standards like VoiceXML and Java, WebSphere Voice Server can leverage existing developer skills, as well as existing Web infrastructure and applications, making it quick and easy to deliver voice-enabled applications that people enjoy using."
Aselect number of "Best of Show" awards were granted following evaluation and voting by the editors on all exhibited products after the show's end. Winning products are featured in the April issue of Computer Telephony, online at www.computertelephony.com.
With over 40 years of delivering voice solutions and over 150 voice technology patents, IBM is the global leader in providing access to data through end-to-end voice integrated solutions that enable organizational effectiveness for e-business development. For more information about IBM Voice Systems, visit www.ibm.com/software/voice.
IBM, WebSphere, DirectTalk, and ViaVoice are trademarks or registered trademarks of IBM Corporation. Dialogic is a registered trademark of Dialogic Corporation. All other product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
Computers that talk
Vol. 21 No. 12 (December 2000)
If you hate using a keyboard to communicate with your PC, you're going to love the next revolution in technology
By Curtis Rist
Just now, Victor Zue's computer sits on his desk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science— but he doesn't expect it to stay there much longer. Computers are already beginning to shrink drastically while they multiply in number. In as little as two years, Zue predicts, they will literally fall off the desktop. He believes tiny but powerful computers will soon be embedded in the walls of offices and homes, in handheld devices that look like cell phones, and in even the most mundane appliances. The refrigerator of the near future, you may have read, will be able to remind you of what you're low on. What you may not have read is that it will order it for you on the Internet. You can already give a travel destination to a luxury automobile— with the right option— and it will direct you where you want to go, turn by turn. Even the lowly alarm clock will soon develop a computer-assisted attitude: Connected to the Internet, it will be able to check your schedule, cross-reference it with traffic reports, and decide what time to wake you up. Zue says that "even more remarkable than the things we'll be doing with all these computers will be the way we interact with them. We won't be typing on keyboards. Instead, we'll be speaking to them."
And they'll be speaking back. A computer that talks has long been an elusive goal, one that has had less to do with science than with Hollywood, where the prototype was HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But as computers become more commonplace, they remain difficult to communicate with, as those who have struggled with a keyboard or dialed their way into oblivion through a voice-mail tree well knows. Those problems would disappear if computers could be programmed to converse with humans.
"Speech is the simplest and fastest form of human communication there is," says Zue, an associate director of the MIT computer lab. "If we could talk to computers, then virtually anyone could use them, without any training at all."
And our working and personal lives would never be the same.
Not long ago, computers were huge collections of vacuum tubes, wire, resistors, and capacitors. The first general-purpose electronic digital computer, built for the U.S. Army in 1946 to calculate ballistic tables, weighed more than 30 tons and contained more than 17,000 vacuum tubes. Because of their expense and unwieldy size, early computers— which came to be known as mainframes— served many people. Each person connected to the computer by a terminal had to compete for time. The arrival of the personal computer in the late 1970s eventually rearranged the equation to a 1-to-1 ratio of computers to people. And now the equation is changing again, so the ratio will soon be many computers per person.
Small but powerful computers linked to the Internet will soon supersede such personal digital assistants as PalmPilots and cellular phones that link wirelessly to the Web. Mike Greenwood, program director of Planet Blue, IBM's ubiquitous-computing lab, is scrambling to create the software that will enable the new generation of computers to connect with one another. He expects that in 10 to 20 years "more than 1 million businesses and 1 billion people will be connected by 1 trillion handheld and embedded devices."
As the devices shrink, the problem of how to enter data increases. A keyboard, even a wireless one that fits in your pocket, would be so small "you'd have to type on it with toothpicks," says Zue.
There is really no alternative but speech. "There's a whole variety of trends that are making it desirable," says David Nahamoo, a manager of voice technology research at IBM. "A talking computer sounds cute, but this is not a novelty or a gimmick. It's essential."
The woman on the phone from mercury Travel Service seems friendly— if uncommonly patient— as Zue checks the schedule of flights from Boston to San Francisco. "What time do planes leave tomorrow?" he asks, peppering her with questions. "Are there any flights returning to Boston in the afternoon? What are the flight numbers? What time do they arrive?" To each, the smooth voice gives a quick, cheerful response. In two minutes Zue has found out enough to book a flight. Aside from the speediness of the transaction, the surprise is that the Mercury travel agent was not human but a computer Zue himself has programmed to recognize human speech. "Not a bad conversationalist for a computer, don't you think?" he says, hanging up the telephone.
Such fluency didn't come easily for the computer or for Zue himself, who had to struggle to acquire conversational English skills. Born in China, Zue enrolled as a student at the University of Florida in the late 1960s to be near his older sisters, who had moved there. "To be accepted, I wanted to learn to speak like an American— but that was very difficult," he says. Words such as did you, which he could read easily enough in a textbook, suddenly turned into the incomprehensible "didju" when he heard them spoken. Everywhere he turned, he says, he found himself flummoxed by inexplicable rules of pronunciation.
Zue's spark of inspiration came, ironically enough, from Hollywood. In 1968, after making hard-won progress in his English studies, he went to see 2001 and became riveted by HAL, the talking computer. "I saw it and said, 'This is it— this is the future,' " he recalls. "If I could learn all the different rules of pronunciation, then a computer could too." Determined to find a way to do it, he headed for graduate school at MIT. Somehow, he knew, computers could be taught to "hear" what was being spoken but that it would involve more than just wiring up a microphone. "Because of accents and the way words are pronounced, the ear is a very bad decoder of language— both for foreigners and computers," says Zue. "Instead, what I went looking for was a visual representation of speech."
What he ended up with was a spectrogram— an electronic tracing of speech sounds. No one had ever been able to "read" a spectrogram before, but Zue— practicing one hour a day for four years— showed that it could be done. He then theorized that he could teach a computer to take frequency readings from a spoken voice that are similar to a spectrogram, which has turned out to be a reliable way to code speech. "It essentially takes human language and translates it into a language that the computer can understand," Zue says.
At the core of speech recognition lies the phoneme, which is the basic phonetic building block. It's short— often barely 100 milliseconds in all— but that's all the time required to change a b sound to a p, and to change the word bit into pit. To understand speech, a computer translates the spoken word into an electronic representation of these phonemes, then matches them against templates showing real words and clusters of words. "It finds the best possible match between the incoming measurements and the stored measurements for the sound," says Zue. The computer considers what it has "heard," then chooses the most likely meaning— exactly as Zue did when he first learned English. "Basically, I'm treating a machine as a foreign person new to the language," he says. The software programs he wrote, while massive, amount to little more than grammar lessons and instructions on pronunciation: "You teach the computer grammar rules one by one, much the same as a student would learn in kindergarten through high school."
The scope of that challenge becomes clear when taking a look at some of the peculiarities that litter the language— beginning with the homonyms. "We say 'there,' " says Zue. "But do we mean there, they're, or their?" Also, the same letter can be pronounced differently depending on its position in a word. The t in each of the words top, try, city, and button, for instance, sounds radically different, and computers need to be instructed about this. Many times the only way you can understand what someone has said is by remembering what came before. For instance, says Zue, a spoken conversation might contain the line, "How about Japanese?" That could be a reference to currency or language, "until you remember that the discussion is about what kind of restaurant to head to for lunch," he says. "Only in connection with what's spoken before does the sentence make sense."
Sometimes, the sounds of words can be interpreted in wildly different ways— resulting in comic mishandlings of the language, such as when euthanasia, is read youth in Asia or recognize speech comes out wreck a nice beach. Adding to the mayhem, combinations of letters can also sound different depending on where they're found. The words gas shortage, for instance, are pronounced "ga-shortage," says Zue, with the s sound in gas becoming subsumed by the sh in shortage. "But the same rule doesn't apply to the words fish sandwich. You have to pronounce the sh and s distinctly; if you say 'fi-shandwich,' you'll end up sounding like a foreigner."
Most of these problems have been surmounted through grammar instructions, however, and dictation software programs— which have been available for more than a decade— have an error rate of roughly one word per sentence. That might not sound bad, says Zue, "but it would certainly get you fired if you were a typist."
Moreover, to engage in conversation, a computer has to do more than transcribe what's recited to it. It has to provide intelligent responses to questions. "The computer can't think, but it can access information," says Zue. And computers can be linked to the mother of all information repositories— the Internet. For the Mercury Travel Service, Zue's computer translates a spoken question into digital code, then searches the Internet for an up-to-the-minute answer. From there, the process reverses— and the computer speaks the answer.
In addition to Mercury, two other prototype systems developed by Zue's lab at MIT will be linked to the Internet for real-time data searches: Voyager will provide up-to-date information about traffic conditions in Boston, and Jupiter will give details of the weather in 500 cities. For the time being, the systems do not communicate with one another. So a caller who asks Mercury about the weather will be told, "I'm sorry, I do not understand your question." But a question focused on air travel will prompt an instantaneous answer. "We're building systems with very good competence within a narrow domain," says Zue. "The challenge now is to stitch these together— almost like little pieces of a cloth in a quilt— so that one day a person could navigate smoothly from one domain to another."
As this quilt grows, computing as we know it will dramatically change, providing people with instant access to whatever information they want, whenever and wherever they want it. Some people already use cell phones to check e-mail or get instant stock quotes, and within two years speech recognition will begin to eliminate the need to use the tiny button pads on the phone as keyboards. Old-fashioned VCRs will be supplanted in the next few years by "black boxes," which will search TV listings via the Internet and figure out the date, time, and channel of the program to be recorded. When speech recognition is added, tailoring an individual viewing schedule will be as easy as, say, giving a voice command to record all cooking shows or baseball games. Ultimately, speech technology will radically transform people's daily lives by turning computers into eager assistants rather than nemeses. "Speech capability will do to computers what Netscape Navigator did for the Internet," says James Flanagan, director of the Center for Advanced Information Processing at Rutgers University. "It will popularize things that are now too difficult for the average person to use and will reinvent the way we interact with our computers for all time."
Farther down the line, a single small "computing device" will emerge, a speech-controlled device that can be programmed to turn into whatever you want it to be— from cell phone to personal data assistant to digital video camera— just by downloading different software. "No one can be 100 percent sure where we're all headed with speech recognition, but I'll tell you one thing," says Flanagan. "We'll need a mighty big landfill to hold all the electronics equipment it will make obsolete."
Including, many believe, the computer keyboard. "I'm confident it's going to disappear completely in five to 10 years," says Xuedong Huang, general manager of the Speech.Net Group at Microsoft, which has made speech-enabled computing one of its top priorities since 1993. "I'll bet 50 years from now people will look back on us laboriously typing our instructions in on a keyboard and laugh. 'You mean, you had to compose each word?' they'll ask. 'One letter at a time?' They'll think it's very, very funny!"
Perhaps, but others remain more circumspect. "For myself, I can't imagine not using my keyboard," says Gary Herman, director of Hewlett-Packard's Internet and Mobile Systems Laboratory. And he suspects others may feel the same way. "We may have the capability for computer-enabled speech and the vision of what to do with it," Herman says, "but we can't know for certain whether people will actually want to relate to computers like this until we try it."
Fortunately, humans— rather than computers— will have the final say.
Chip Ahoy!
The microchip that forms the heart of the modern computer comes with a surprising limitation— it is hardwired. Therefore, the pathways that electrical signals can follow are limited, and different chips must be designed for different applications. "What you end up with are separate chips for separate uses— whether they're for a PC, a cell phone, or a PalmPilot," says Anant Agarwal, an associate director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. "There's no flexibility at all." That's quite a limitation if computers are expected to become smaller, less obvious, dedicated to a single task, and more pervasive. "You'll end up having to have 100 separate devices for 100 uses," says Agarwal. So he and a team of researchers are developing an alternative chip called Raw that, he says, "exposes the raw hardware to the software system." Instead of being hardwired, the Raw microprocessor will contain a rectangular array of many identical tiles that are configured by the software. When electronic devices are built with Raw chips, "I'll no longer have just a cell phone, or just a Palm Pilot, or just a Walkman," says Agarwal. "Instead, I'll have a generic computing device that can literally turn itself into whatever is needed." A "spit and bailing wire" prototype of that device, which he has dubbed H21, should be up and running later this year. Then, "if I say, 'Hey, turn yourself into a cell phone,' " Agarwal says, "it will be able to locate the appropriate configuration software through the Internet, download it, and configure the wires of the Raw chip inside to give it the characteristics of a cell phone." — C.R.
The Wings of Mercury
Human speech, riddled with tricky phonetics, garbled syntax, and ambiguous phrasings, is far from perfect, a problem that becomes magnified when a computer enters the conversation. To limit the errors a computer could make trying to understand and respond to humans, Victor Zue of MIT believes we'll need different programs for different topics, such as the weather, traffic updates, or travel information. "These separate domains can be stitched together to create the illusion of a vast store of knowledge, in which a computer can appear to move seamlessly from one subject to another," he says. Here's how one such domain— Mercury Travel Service, a research prototype flight-information service developed by Zue and his colleagues— works now.
1
Zue dials up Mercury via telephone (617-258-6040) and asks a question: "When does the next flight leave from Boston for San Francisco?"
2
The computer doesn't actually hear what Zue is saying. Instead, it records his words, translates them into digital code, and slices them into small segments called phonemes, which it analyzes according to their resonant frequencies. These are matched against templates— idealized models of real words— that are written into the software.
3
Using probability statistics, the computer determines the likelihood that a cluster of sounds corresponds to actual words. It then strings together these words, ruling out unlikely combinations. Because it uses probability, Mercury can handle a huge variety of accents and speaking styles yet still capture the essential meaning of a question.
4
Relying on syntax and grammar rules coded into its software, Mercury analyzes the meaning of the question, just as students in a high school English class diagram sentences.
5
Mercury accesses the Internet to search various online databases, just as people do when they type a request into a search engine. At this stage, while still in prototype, Mercury is limited to specific airline Web sites that Zue's staff has selected in advance.
6
Mercury uses a voice synthesizer to convert the sequence of digitized words it finds on the Internet into audible speech. Instead of sounding robotic, the female voice sounds reassuringly human. That's because it relies on a process called concatenation, in which snippets of information, such as the names of airlines, flight numbers, and destinations, are prerecorded by an actual person, stockpiled in a database, and spliced together as needed by the computer. To be practical, this can be done only for domains with narrow subjects such as travel plans. But the result, says Zue, "sounds completely natural."
7
An instant after Zue asks his question, Mercury responds: "The next flight from Boston to San Francisco is United Flight 523, leaving at 3:30 this afternoon. Would that work?"
Mercury translates speech (bottom) into an audio wave form (center) and then into a spectrogram (top). Voice-recognition software deciphers the subtle pattern shifts in the spectrogram and uses probability models to identify what words were spoken.
RELATED WEB SITES:
The next time you travel, first call Mercury at 617-258-6040 and "donate your voice to science." The research prototype cannot yet make reservations but will be able to help you establish an itinerary. See the Web site of the Spoken Language Systems group at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science at www.sls.lcs.mit.edu. For more about the work of Microsoft Research's Speech Technology Group, see research.microsoft.com/stg.
© Copyright 2000 The Walt Disney Company. Back to Homepage.
IBM TO VOICE-ENABLE CONSUMER APPLIANCES
IBM Also Announces Japanese Version of IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Multiplatform Edition
TOKYO, JAPAN, October 31, 2000—IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today that it is teaming with Canon (NYSE: CAJ) to drive the implementation of certain voice-enabled consumer devices, such as kitchen appliances, toys and game consoles. The introduction of IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition allows consumers to simply use their voices to speak to a variety of workplace and home devices.
Also, IBM introduced today the Japanese version of its IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Multiplatform Edition that provides developers in Japan a means to create voice-enabled solutions for mobile or handheld devices.
The new IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition joins the existing offerings of embedded ViaVoice products. These include:
IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Multiplatform Edition which enables developers to create voice-enabled mobile solutions.
IBM ViaVoice SDK for Linux which enables Linux developers to incorporate voice recognition technology into their next generation of applications.
"IBM Voice Systems is very pleased to join forces with Canon to offer these powerful voice solutions and extend the ViaVoice product line," said W. S. (Ozzie) Osborne, general manager, IBM Voice Systems. "The IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition is ideal for a hands-free, eyes-free environment, where consumers don't need to rely on their hands or eyes to interact with an electronic device-they just need their voice."
"Creating voice interfaces for these small devices marks the success of voice recognition technology," said Dr. Kazuya Matsumoto, chairman of Canon Research Centre Europe Ltd. "Canon is looking forward to working with IBM to bring a voice interface to a variety of devices and appliances."
IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition
Requiring only 5-10 MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second) for voice recognition processing, IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition provides an active vocabulary of up to 50 words for consumers who personalize their own devices, such as cell phones and PDAs. It also offers the option of pre-loading 10-20 active words for user-independent vocabularies, ideal for electronic devices that need only simplified commands, such as kitchen appliances and toys. IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition's vocabulary can expand to the amount of flash memory in the device. Applications can dynamically switch between active vocabularies or share a single vocabulary.
Part of the IBM Voice Systems product line, IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition offers a low cost solution for incorporating voice capability into a number of mobile devices. Customers will find entry level command and control features, high accuracy rates, vocabulary development and compatibility, telephone quality microphones, as well as worldwide support from IBM and Canon. IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition vocabularies may be customized by the user or manufacturer to operate in any language and will be available by the end of this year.
IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Multiplatform Edition available in Japanese
The Japanese version of IBM's Embedded ViaVoice, Multiplatform Edition is a toolkit that provides developers with resources to create voice-enabled mobile solutions. Software Development (SDK) and RunTime Kits, with fees based on individual implementation scenarios, are available from IBM Voice Systems' Web site, www.ibm.com/software/voice.
System Requirements for IBM Embedded ViaVoice Mobile Device Edition
MIPS Required: 5-10
Memory Required: less than 200 KB RAM; less than 200 KB ROM
8 kHz sampling rate
Telephone microphones acceptable
RTOS SUPPORT: WinCE
RTOS not required
System Requirements for Japanese edition of IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Multiplatform Edition
MIPS Required: 90
Memory Required: 242- 466 KB DRAM (all platforms tested)
380 KB - 2.0 MB ROM or Flash
Specified Microphone: Lucent Microphone SDM100 or equivalent AKGQ400MK3 for Automotive
Specified CODEC: 16 bit sample, 11.025kHz, mono channel, signed linear PCM, 20 Db boost (suggest 10 steps minimum of 1, 1.5, or 2 Db/step)
Pricing and Availability
IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Mobile Device Edition is available today. Pricing is based on volumes.
The Japanese edition of IBM Embedded ViaVoice, Multiplatform Edition will be available by the end of this year from the IBM Voice Systems' Web site located at www.ibm.com/software/voice. IBM works with customers to develop a complete solution for their mobile devices and pricing for the SDK and RunTime Kits are based on the specific solution requirements.
# # #
About IBM Voice Systems
With over 30 years of delivering voice solutions and over 100 voice technology patents, IBM is the global leader in providing access to data through end-to-end voice integrated solutions that enable organizational effectiveness for e-business development. For more information about IBM Voice Systems, visit http://www.ibm.com/software/voice.