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PRODUCTIVITY December 2000 • Vol.6 Issue 12 Page(s) 50-53 in print issue |
Voice Portals You Can Hear Clearly Now | ||
 Automated telephone operators are one of the few technological advances that nearly everyone reacts to with disgust, but what if that robotic voice on the other end of the line was actually telling you something you wanted to hear? What if, instead of guiding you through a convoluted menu of customer support options, it was giving you quick access to stock quotes, news, address-to-address directions, or even the Internet? That's what voice portals, or voice-activated networks, are all about. They use advanced technology to understand and respond to speech commands and deliver either prerecorded or dynamic content using speech over a standard telephone. Voice portals are not an entirely new idea; phone companies have been providing information hotlines for years that locals can dial into get movie times, weather reports, and other data. Unlike the time and temperature calls of old, the new services have voice-activated navigation systems, can be accessed from anywhere, and have a dynamic nature to their content. Many of these services read data from an ever-changing database or directly from the Internet, so you can get the same up-to-the-minute updates Web users enjoy without having a computer.  What Has Changed? Voice portal technology has a long way to go before it's perfect, but many improvements have been made in key areas in the last year. One of the biggest obstacles, the speech recognition software that translates your voice into commands the computer can use, is surprisingly accurate nowadays. Using the major voice portals, we had few problems being understood regardless of the accents we used, and mumbling seems to be the only way to stump the latest technology. Regardless, misinterpreted words are frustrating, and it will take some time before you can achieve anything close to a 100% accuracy rate.
Although voice menus are getting better, they are not an ideal interface, and voice portals are harder to navigate than services that use a visual interface. Many of the voice portals available today have so many options it can be hard to remember exactly what's available. All of the services we tested give users detailed help, but having a voice read a list of options takes much longer than visually skimming a list of the same length. Users must have patience and a willingness to memorize several commands before a voice portal service can be truly useful. Although many voice portal services are becoming more useful, the fact remains that Internet-capable telephones and other devices that can display text are much better for accessing much of the information voice portals provide. It is handier to have a printed list of driving directions rather than listen to them over the phone or to read e-mail rather than hear it read in a halting, electronic voice. There are some things voice portals just aren't good at, and those unfortunately tend to be the most useful services. Combine that with the fact that most people are still uncomfortable talking to machines, and it's easy to see why it may take some time for voice portals to really catch on. A final major stumbling block is the difficulty of fully automating a service that would be better fulfilled by humans. No matter how accurate current voice recognition technology is, humans are better at understanding what other people are saying and providing appropriate information. All of the voice portal services we've looked at were frustrating to use at one point or another simply because the computer running the show completely failed to understand a command or request that a person would have had no trouble with.
Does It Work? We tested a number of the more popular voice portals to see if they really deliver the freedom they promise. Although the technology behind all of this is still in its infancy, we were impressed by the relative quality and speed many of these services provide. Two in particular really stood out, so we gave them a thorough workout and reported the results so you'll know what to expect from the current generation of voice portals. BeVocal(800) 428-6225http://www.bevocal.com BeVocal's voice portal has steadily improved to become one of the better services of its kind. It is reasonably fast, accurate, easy to use, and has a lot of advanced services that belie the fact that it is completely free. We used it to get quick stock quotes, driving directions, local weather reports, flight information, and other data. The stock quotes are one of the service's best features. We didn't even have to memorize ticker symbols because you can retrieve quotes simply by saying a company name. We rattled off a number of company names, and the service rarely failed to zero in on exactly what we were looking for. After hearing the current price of the stock, BeVocal.com made it easy to quickly dig up deeper levels of information. By saying, "More detail," we got a 52-week high and low, a daily high and low, and the daily volume of the stock. Best of all, once we registered at the Web site and logged into the service by saying our PIN, we were able to create a stock portfolio by saying, "Add that," when a stock quote was being read. When we said, "Portfolio," we were able to get a fast rundown of the current condition of the stocks in the portfolio without retrieving the data one stock at a time.
Our experience with BeVocal was positive but not perfect. BeVocal doesn't read through the menus and instructions as quickly as some of the other portals we tested, making navigation cumbersome. We also discovered that some of BeVocal's services, such as traffic information and driving directions, cover only a few metropolitan areas, although this situation should improve as it expands the service. Tellme(800) 555-8355http://www.tellme.com Tellme Networks' Tellme is another free portal that offers a plethora of services. Although it lacks some of the more advanced features we liked about BeVocal, such as the driving directions, Tellme's scope and overall speed more than made up for the missing features. It offers extensive information, ranging from news to soap opera updates, and it adds new categories all the time. There's even an interactive blackjack game that lets you play using simple voice commands. You can't win any money playing it, of course, but you won't need to because Tellme is free. The blackjack and horoscope features are more entertaining than useful, but the rest of Tellme's services offer some real value, especially if you take the time to sign up for a free account before using the service. Stock quotes and portfolios are easy to access, and if there's important news regarding one of the stocks you are tracking, Tellme can read it to you. One of Tellme's best features is its restaurant information. The company has partnered with Zagat to provide short reviews for many of the restaurants in its database, and the service can instantly connect you to a restaurant that sounds interesting so you can make a reservation. The travel category works much the same way, automatically connecting users to car rental agencies, airlines, and hotels to make a quick reservation before returning to the Tellme service. There's even a separate taxi category that makes it easy to call a cab from nearly anywhere. Tellme lets you access information about weather conditions and forecasts for more than 30,000 U.S. cities, and if you have an account, you can establish a list of favorites—a feature that works well when you are traveling cross-country because you can enter various cities along your route onto the favorites list. In addition to the services already discussed, Tellme provides movie reviews and times, lottery information, sports news, traffic conditions (for certain cities), and the current time (for the time zone you're in when you place the call). Perhaps the main draw of Tellme is its speed. We rarely felt like the voice "attendants" were bogging us down, and the speech recognition technology was accurate enough to make navigation a breeze. With the exception of the cheesy blackjack dealer, Tellme also has some of the best computer voices we've heard.
Voice Surfing. The services discussed up until now offer a lot of content that is pulled off the Internet, but there are services that let users access the entire Web through their telephones. You can follow links and move forward and backward through Web sites using voice commands, and text-to-speech software will read the pages to you. One such service, netECHO by InternetSpeech.com ($29.95 per month; http://www.internetspeech.com), is slated to be available by the time you read this. The technology employed by netECHO is capable of accessing and reading any Web page, without any special cooperation or formatting required by page designers. The service also acts as a voice portal to provide quick access to standardized data such as stock quotes and weather reports. Dr. Emdad Khan, president and CEO of Internetspeech.com (and the inventor of netECHO), gave us a demonstration of the company's premiere product that was fairly impressive. Khan dialed into the service, accessed his e-mail account, and it read his messages to him in a very understandable, text-to-speech voice. Khan recorded his responses that could then be e-mailed as sound file attachments. (The ability to accurately and quickly process voice-to-text data is a long way off. At this point, sound files are the only viable way to send sound files if your phone doesn't have a text entry device.) After the e-mail demonstration, Khan used netECHO to access the Internet and read pages in real-time. The beta we tested had a Popular Web Sites feature that will eventually contain a database of oft-visited Web sites. You'll be able to access them by saying the company's name instead of spelling out the entire address. For example, Khan said, "CNN," and the software navigated to CNN.com and began reading the news stories on the site's home page. When we tested it, netECHO had some rough edges. It read straight down the source code (the data file that contains the special HTML formatting for a Web page, as well as it's contents) of a page, which works better at some sites than others. When we visited Smart Computing's Web site (http://www.smartcomputing.com) netECHO started reading the links on the left side of the page, and it would have been a chore to navigate anywhere. Dr. Khan promises that netECHO will employ special algorithms by the time it goes live that will let it extract highlights, such as news and other large blocks of text, from a page and read those first. Regardless of what happens, we'll be curious to see how the service handles the thorny problem of efficiently navigating a complex Web site using what amounts to a linear navigation system. This is a problem all companies that wish to provide Internet access over a telephone must face. The Verdict On Voice Portals. AOL (America Online) made it clear that it has big plans for voice portal technology when it acquired Quack.com, one of the earliest voice portals. AOL will likely implement advanced voice portal technology for its customers by the time this article hits the stands. New formatting languages, such as VXML (Voice Extensible Markup Language), are making it easier than ever for companies to create voice portal content that is truly useful. Considering the advances we've seen in the last few years, it shouldn't be long before the electronic voices that voice portals rely on become virtually indistinguishable from those of humans. Voice portal technology is also perfectly suited for certain environments. For example, it is a good match for drivers who need to constantly interact with the Internet. The ability to give complex voice commands will let drivers keep their hands on the wheel, and advanced text-to-speech technology will let them keep their attention on the road while listening to their messages and news from the Web. The real reason voice portals are here to stay is that you don't need expensive equipment to use them. If you have a telephone, you can access the services, which somewhat bridges the "digital divide" that has kept timely information out of the hands of the technological have-nots for years. The services we looked at are also a boon to mobile professionals and travelers, and things are bound to get even better as the behind-the-scenes technology is refined.  by Tracy Baker |
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