Aug
14
Speech is the Future of Search
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data protection, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Here is an extract from a story carried by the International Herald Tribune on 14 August 2012;
august 14, 2012
Quaid’s speech calling for religious, ethnic tolerance missing from Radio Pakistan’s archives.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s landmark speech at the Constituent Assembly’s
first meeting on August 11, 1947 in Karachi has been missing for decades
and all recent efforts to retrieve it have so far been in vain.
These days, Radio Pakistan runs an Urdu translation recorded in
somebody else’s voice of the same speech. Where the original speech
disappeared, and whether this was deliberate, remains an unanswered
question.
It may be no coincidence that the missing speech has these famous
words in it: “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are
free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this
state of Pakistan …You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that
has nothing to do with the business of the state.”
It was also in this speech that the founder had said that the first
duty of a government was to maintain law and order, “so that the life,
property and religious beliefs of its subjects are fully protected by
the state.”
Important words, and never more so than at this time. And almost certainly not lost – mislabelled, misfiled, disguised by inadequate metadata, maybe, but it is worth a small wager that the speech turns up one day – so very many things do. The world is full of attics and libraries from which lost symphonies, early works of poetry, the juvenilia of great writers reappear with monotonous regularity. This speech will be found.
But the story interested me because it provided a graphic reminder of the problem and potential of speech, and returned me to a long held conviction – that voice is the real future of search. However, I no longer believe that the route to this is through Google and the other search engines. though I am aware of Google’s downloadable voice search app, and I am sure that the pace set in this area will accelerate as Google get even further invested in the future of the smart phone. However, we need semantic technologies that can treat text as voice and vice versa for search purposes, and while we have evidence of many attributes in this pipeline, we seem to be a long way away from finding a universal solution, and one that resolves the legacy content issues as well.
I am coming to believe, however, in the explosive growth potential for voice in business, partly because of Siri and its ilk, partly because of the need to get more functionality into the phone than the keyboard will allow, but mostly because I can now see a group of very relevant business areas where being able to move seamlessly from voice to text, to be able to search both using either, unlocks productivity gains that cannot be attained in any other way. My conclusions on this were formed by following two companies quite closely. One was Aurix (www.aurix.com), a former UK Defense establishment company privatized within QinetiQ and now owned by Avaya. No prizes for guessing where their voice interests began, but their interests now lie far beyond security and intelligence. The other is BigHand (http://uk.bighand.com), bought earlier this year by my colleagues at Bridgepoint, where I do some media advisory work. It happens that both of these are UK technology companies, but I am sure that we could find equivalents for them in the USA or Israel.
Clearly a vital sector for voice search remains security. Searching voicemail alone when required is a major undertaking (not even the News of the World in its prime had the right technologies). Beyond this, media and broadcasting is surely a primary market. No one who drowned in the ocean of superlatives surrounding the London Olympics can doubt that heavyweight voice technologies of the sort that Aurix deploys will be as critical as the major investment put together by the BBC, partnering with MarkLogic, to put in the text-image-video handling platform that sat behind the BBC Sport website. And then we put together the fastest growing sector – monitoring and searching voice messages, recorded conversations and realtime calling in direct selling and customer service contexts. The productivity gains are as large as the range of uses is wide – checking compliance and script adherence, learning from common complaints, measuring call centre workloads, analysing trends in customer response etc etc.
And there are two marketplaces where voice records, the ability to attach them to text records, and to search both at the same time, has always been important, even when it wasn’t possible. One is the law practice market, and the other is the health market. Here there are solid traditions of voice recording, but real productivity gains to be made (for example, in legal eDiscovery) by using effective voice search. BigHand are market leaders in legal dictation and have the exciting prospect before them of what seemed a limited market a few years ago now opening out in an interesting way to embrace technology change which will then move into education (voice reports?), surveying, engineering and then some of the science research disciplines. As a law database publisher in 1982, I now have the delightful prospect of seeing another wave come ashore in the same market with very similar productivity, and compliance, advantages.
So here then is a brief sketch of a demand-led digital voice revolution. In 2020 we will ask our screen for research results, and define if we want them by ear or by eye – bearing in mind that some of the results will be transcripted voice turned into text, and others will be text turned into speech. Around then we shall find the missing speech in this news story – and admire again the wonderful sentiments of the speaker.
Aug
8
After You, Mr Dickens…
Filed Under Blog, eBook, eLearning, mobile content, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 3 Comments
In the midst of the Olympiad, it is hard to remember that we should be celebrating two centuries since the birth of Charles Dickens in 1812. My private undertaking was to read Michael Slater’s literary biography of the great man (Yale, 2009), and I am now at the midpoint of its massive 650 pages of densely packed information. It is a fascinating but heavy tome, so when I fell asleep with it on my lap last evening, it is hardly surprizing that, in reverie, I encountered the great man himself and was able to pose one or two questions that have been troubling me. I found him alert, right up to date (though his use of slang owes more these days, he tells me, to TV soap operas than the streets of London’s East End) and full of his typical energy in tackling modern problems.
“Future of publishing, you say? Well, future of literature, and self -education is one thing, but if the future of publishing means the future prosperity of publishers, then I cannot link the two. My publishers were either printers or booksellers, and when they were not trying to make off with my livelihood they were trying to cheat each other. I never had a good one after Chapman and Hall, and even the best got greedy.”
“That’s why this technology stuff is so fascinating. Restores the balance. Now once again authors and readers are powerful and intermediaries are fighting for their lives – capital good stuff. If only I had been able to employ your tools. The eBook is brilliant for me – here was the method I needed to serialize my stuff properly. If I was doing it today, I would publish on Amazon or AppStore in 20 monthly parts for 99p per part, then collect the whole lot at the end into a single volume for £17.50. Then I would read each part myself on your splendid You Tube thingy, then do the album from that. Then the illustrated text – my dear Phiz could just about have managed animations – so in the final, de luxe, Christmas edition we could have text, animation and voice all integrated. And, of course, I would have been a natural as a film producer, so the ultimate collection, as well as my brilliant readings – almost killed me, dear boy, those did – would have film versions as well. All those price points, all those entry levels, all those royalty cheques! But, recall this: serialization is the secret to the build – and to building an audience which will discuss your work and constantly sell it to each other. We got over 70,000 on the Old Curiosity Shop serialization – my breakthrough to an audience that I could address time and again, and hold stable with my magazines, like Household Words (yes, we shall live in their mouths like Household Words – does no one perform Henry V these days?)”.
“So what is going wrong? Simply, dear boy, you have no genious! Everything is either controlled by publishers, who always want to hold onto the past and ride it into the future, or by distributors. They are the death of innovation – as soon as they have innovated they want to stop the business model merry-g0-round and milk the wooden animals on it. I want to see authors blazing this new trail. Cory Doctorow? Never heard of him. Was he one of those damn Yankees who were so rude to me in ’41? Go out and build audience in these digital networks, and then watch the world come to your door. Look at me! Don’t wait for publishers to move into the nineteenth century – that’s a joke, a jeu d’esprit, but you know what I mean. Before I came along there was no real serialization. Literature was a three decker novel. I changed all that. People demanding to read in railway trains changed all that. Now you have smartphones and people in subways. Its a challenge to genious and you are failing it. Fifty Shades? Yes, I was reading it aloud to poor Wilkie Collins only the other night. Boring, we thought. Unrelated to what goes on in your society.”
“What goes on in your society? My dear child, you try my patience since you have less natural intelligence than Jo the crossing sweeper. Only this morning I read in the dear old Manchester Guardian (and they said my Liberal Daily News would not last!) that a boy near London had spent a year living in a tent without an income because he “fell through the net” between different local government offices. 44% of my modern Londoners do not have English as a first language. Your care homes are a scandal of violence and bullying of subnormal young people and intimidation and neglect of the powerless elderly. And this is what a responsible, well-paid, allegedly trained “professional, caring” society does to them or allows others to do to them. Dotheboys Hall? You have so much more to write about than I did! And my government did the Great Exhibition and yours is doing the Olympics. Bread and circuses, dear boy”.
“Whats that? I’m a bit deaf on this side. Oh, you think people do not flock to Literature because they will get their intellectual property ripped off? (Interesting expression – mind if I make a note?). Look, this whole Copyright thing is a farce. Please, please start again somewhere else. Perhaps with an International Licensing Convention. Copyright is the shibboleth of those who own rights and not property. It was created in Queen Anne’s time to stop booksellers and printers from ripping each other off. In my time, the heinously criminal American publishers lobbied their government to maintain the fact that they had never signed the international copyright conventions. As a result I had a huge audience in the USA by 1841, but never had a penny in royalties from it. My solution? Do my public readings there – then they had to pay to get through the door to see me. But when I spoke in the USA about this I was always told, by those toads of journalists, that I “besmirched the face of literature by mentioning a pecuniary interest!” And I had similar problems with plays – as my serializations came to an end of story, plays would start appearing in the West End and Broadway using my characters – and second guessing the endings! So I used to alter the endings… until I got wise and did a play collaboration with one company. But now, dear boy, you need to wake up….”
And, just then, I did…
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