tin- this should answer some of your questions:
IVAN Voice Browser: A Promising Start
Free download lets you surf the Web with natural language commands.
Glenn McDonald, special to PCWorld.com
Friday, November 10, 2000
Ready to toss away your mouse and surf the Web by voice? IVAN, from One Voice technologies, purports to be the world's first talking interface for surfing the Internet. A voice-interactive Web browser, IVAN--like the rest of the voice interface industry--is not quite all it's cracked up to be. But this add-on does bring us closer to making voice navigation of the Web a reality.
Web Guide
Available for free download from One Voice, IVAN stands for Intelligent Voice Animated Navigator. It's a hefty download, though: at over 128 MB, IVAN requires about 10 to 11 hours over a 56-kbps line, or 30 minutes over a broadband connection. Alternatively, you can order the software on CD-ROM for $8.95, and the company will include a headset microphone.
IVAN is built on Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.0's browser engine. If you already have IE 5.0 or later, you'll only need to download IVAN's add-ons. If you have an earlier version of IE installed, IVAN will automatically upgrade you to IE 5. If IE isn't already installed on your system, then IVAN will do a "smart" installation to automatically install the portions of IE that are required to run IVAN. The company says a Netscape Navigator version is in the works; however, it couldn't say when it would be available.
Voice-enabled browsers aren't anything new--Conversa's Conversa Web does much of what IVAN does but without the animation. (Version 3.1 is available from Conversa for $14.95; a free Express version can also be downloaded.) And speech recognition software from Dragon Systems, IBM, and Lernout & Hauspie can be used to control a Web browser by voice; however, none of these packages is interactive, and none can deal with the context of a query.
A Friendly Navigation Assistant
Once installed and set up, IVAN appears as a free-floating animation on your browser screen. Like the Microsoft Windows wizard or Office assistant, IVAN is a talking desktop agent designed to make interaction friendlier--or more irritating, depending on your point of view (the IVAN character can be turned off if you so choose). IVAN will respond to voice commands, and replies in kind. The intention is to allow hands-free Internet surfing that only requires you to use your voice. The package comes with a voice-training module; it takes a few minutes to read through the five sentences required for IVAN to recognize your voice. There's also an orientation module to familiarize yourself with what IVAN can do; it took about an hour to completely run through the package.
What IVAN specializes in, however, is a natural-language approach to surfing the Web. Rather than requiring the user to learn a set of pre-determined voice commands, IVAN is designed to understand natural spoken language. For example, you say, "Ivan, I want to buy a car," and you're shuttled to IVAN's MultiSearch page, which returns IVAN's top five contextual search results for car-buying sites (and gives you further site choices if those first five don't fit the bill). (Like Conversa Web, IVAN overlays any given Web page with numerical tags for each linkable word or image on the page. Just say the number aloud, and IVAN "clicks" the corresponding link.
IVAN uses IBM's ViaVoice speech recognition system and One Voice's proprietary Intelligent Voice Interactive technology (IVIT) to facilitate the program's two-way natural language interface. According to One Voice, the IVIT system uses advanced inference and adaptive-learning techniques to translate conversational English into understandable commands. In addition, constantly updated knowledge bases keep track of previous commands and help IVAN anticipate what you want.
Because One Voice is also involved in developing voice systems for Web site administrators and businesses, sites that have implemented IVAN--such as Britannica.com, Monster.com, Samsonite.com, and Autobytel.com--offer an improved experience with IVAN, because IVAN can more easily search conceptually through IVAN-enabled Web sites. Our searches were more pinpointed and more accurate on these sites than they were on sites not powered by IVAN. (Only four sites are powered by IVAN so far; the company plans to announce more sites in the near future.)
We saw mixed results in our tests. We tested IVAN on a 333-MHz Pentium II with 64MB of RAM running Windows 95, and IVAN's verbal responses often skipped and stalled. IVAN requires Windows 95 OSR2.1, 98, ME, NT, or 2000 and a sound card (a full duplex sound card is recommended) in order to work. While you can use any headset or microphone, the company recommends a noise-canceling microphone for best results.
However, we were pleasantly surprised at times, when IVAN figured out what we wanted and brought the page up immediately. At other times, IVAN was rather dense. Variations on "I want to read the news" took me everywhere from iWon to CD stores. (Ivan thought we said, "I want to buy a CD, please." At least IVAN complimented me on my manners.) "I want to read headlines" proved no better. Finally, we tried "find CNN" and got the desired result.
In general, IVAN did better with common surfing terms like "go to," "scroll down," "page back," and so forth, which is to be expected. When a voice system can anticipate a set of probable requests, accuracy improves tremendously. Also, IVAN learns your speech patterns as you go along, so after continued usage, its performance should improve further.
Still, it's not very practical yet: IVAN slows down surfing substantially, because it must analyze each voice command before executing it. Power users interested in free online voice navigation will likely prefer the more streamlined Conversa Web Express, which has similar functionality, but without the animation.
Bearing in mind that this is a first-generation product, and that it's free (if you're up to the download), IVAN is promising. While Ivan won't allow you to talk to your PC like a Star Trek commander, it could be useful for the disabled or for people who want to put less stress on their hands and wrists.
