DSTO in Voice Software Breakthrough
The federal government's Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO)
has teamed with a small Melbourne software company to crack one of the big
challenges in voice recognition software: automatic transcription software that
lets multiple people speak at once.
The new application, demonstrated at the CeBIT Australia technology expo in Sydney yesterday, creates transcripts of both
sides of a two-person conversation, according to Greg Findlay, in charge f
global market development at Voice Perfect Systems, a privately held software
company that worked with DSTO on the six-year project to create the software.
The application, he said, also identified who was speaking and figured out what
they were saying to a high degree of accuracy. It was initially developed by DSTO to automatically create written records of defence command and control
operations.
Mr Findlay said the commercial version, known as Voice Perfect
Multi-Speak, would eventually be capable of transcribing meetings of more than
two people, making it useful for automatically taking minutes of boardroom
meetings. But the system has a catch that could make the more image conscious
board member think twice before installing it: every voice requires its own
microphone, and in demonstrations of the software yesterday, that involved each
party wearing a call-centre-style microphone headset. Mr Findlay said the
company was working on several ideas that could allow Multi-Speak to work
without separate microphones for each participant.
One way would be to use
tabletop microphones that electronically zoomed in on whoever was speaking. But
that technology, which is already commercially available, did not pass on to
Multi-Speak information about who it was zooming in on.
So it might be that
people in meetings would have to wear lapel mikes, Mr Findlay said. The new
software is based on the popular speech recognition engine, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, made by ScanSoft.