Weekly news round-up prepared by the Editorial Staff of
LangTechNews.
Top of the Week: AT&T
On an industry-wide
scale, LTN notes the announcement that venerable US telecoms research lab AT&T
will
open up its speech-tech nest egg to developers. AT&T has a wealth of
research results in every area of speech communication, so there will be a huge
box of toys (and speech resources) for access via the API. The usual app suspects
- speech translation and virtual assistants - got immediate mention. However, doubts
about whether ASR systems can handle ‘dialect’ and ambient noise may put the
brakes on global solutions. Solving this will play an important role in producing
enterprise-strength ASR that can search all kinds of spoken streams (not just
videos but
phone calls) and can use speech content in all languages and dialects as input to
analytics dashboards. When real data matters – as in training translation
engines or speech recognizers - opening up existing technologies to the
developer crowd will, if nothing else, help quickly eliminate methods that
don’t work in advancing the speech
agenda.
Most Promising New Start-up
The Irish start-up
Xcelerator has just gone BETA with its new KantanMT translation platform and is
ready to serve
customers. Unlike its natural rival
ALS’s SmartMATE solution, which targets the enterprise market
and includes post-editing services, KantanMT is a technology pureplay focusing
on individual translators working in a “traditional” by-the-word service
industry who can afford a modest monthly fee for the technology clout of a
major statistical MT system on a secure cloud, delivered via a simple web
interface. With
millions of people – including professional translators – already using MT, the
market for this professional-level offering is far from trivial. The technology
behind both these companies was spawned by Irish MT researchers. Ireland, and
Dublin in particular, largely pioneered the European software localisation industry
back in the late 1980s and has since developed an academic and real-world
knowledge hub to address next-generation translation, much of it centred at
CNGL (Centre for Next Generation Localisation, at Dublin City University). KantanMT looks like a promising, well-targeted spinoff.
Digital Agenda: The End of Paper
Patents in the EU
Patents provide a vital form of protection for intellectual property, and a source of income in a highly competitive innovation culture. In Europe, the
red-tape involved filing a patent has made it an expensive business, and seen by some as a brake on innovation – not least because of the need to make multiple filings in many countries using different languages. To improve access to European patent information, the European Patent Office (EPO) last year worked out a deal with Google to provide automated translation for patents in multiple languages – much to the dismay of European translation service suppliers. At the same time another Irish-led effort called PLuTO (
EC-funded this time) is being developed to provide a patent translation/search service; it was launched last October and is now live
online in BETA. Everyone it seems is trying to level the playing field for patent filing, while hoping to make some income in the process. This week, in an effort to upgrade the entire patent process, the EPO announced that patent filing had
gone digital. This will, among other things, simplify the translation process for Google Translate and PluTO, and also make searching, analytics and compliance-checking operations far less costly. Expect patent filing to morph into a mobile app sometime soon…
Virtual Business Agents
Virtual Assistants (VAs) – usually voice-based interfaces to computer systems such as retail sites, laptops and now smartphones – have been around for a while in the form of
chatbots. They took on a whole new meaning for consumers with the introduction
of Apple’s Nuance-driven
Siri for iPhone late last year. In many ways VAs pose an AI-complete challenge: delivering language understanding for free-range human speech input under messy real-world conditions. Which is why it is imperative for early developers (such as Apple and
Vlingo) to capture rich data about the user experience across
many languages, so they can debug and
improve these complex products over time. The next – and possibly easier – step, which is already underway, is to switch the target from generic chatbots to business-specific
Enterprise VAs in customer-facing environments where cost,
time, focus and quality are critical sales factors. The
analyst firm Gartner predicts that by next year some 15% of Fortune 1000 companies will use a virtual assistant to serve up Web self-service content for CRM service delivery. And the trend is not limited to customer service: last week EasyAsk launched a mobile service provocatively called
Quiri to allow business users to ask questions and get answers from any number of existing corporate data sources, including CRM and business intelligence systems. Meanwhile Forrester reported that
Synthetix is one of 10 leading vendors in its analysis of
Five Essential eBusiness Criteria For a Successful Virtual Agent Vendor Selection. Now that
tablets are expected to become the preferred computing device by 2016, VA-friendliness (including speech interfaces) will likely evolve into a crucial selling point for enterprise users. LTN expects that equipping these next-generation interfaces with
voice
biometrics for security will be a milestone on that path.
