The End Of Voicemail?

The end of voicemail

A new voice recognition system could spell the end to traditional voicemail.

The end of traditional voicemail could be imminent if new voice recognition technology goes mainstream.

The software is now so developed it can accurately turn sound to text even in noisy environments, an expert on the subject has said.

Dr Tony Robinson says voicemails can be turned into "completely readable" texts, even if recorded in busy train stations and regardless of regional accents.

He is director of the Cambridge-based Advanced Speech Group, part of Spinvox, the firm that has developed this technology into a service which has six million users around the world.

The secret is "hidden Markov models" which can learn to adapt to different voices and even new slang.

"We train our HMM systems on everybody's speech so that when it comes in, because it's machine learning, it can see all the changes and how people talk, and how they have different accents," says Robinson.

"We can build them all into one big model which we run on lots very powerful computers behind the scenes," Dr Robinson told Technofile.

They can filter out background noises and eliminate the "umms" and "errs" that pepper most people's speech, so that users can leave a voicemail that is translated into a text message.

"There's a lot of processing even before it hits the speech recognition - so we're estimating what the sort of noise is and compensating for it."

"So, it's an adaptation process to noise, just as we learn and adjust to speakers," Robinson explains. "It will be completely readable."

Voice recognition solutions are also being developed for cars and handheld devices by firms such as IBM, and satellite navigation manufacturers Tom Tom.

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