Google: Voice to Text
September 19, 2008
For me, the question was, “What took so long?” The person who invented some of Google’s voice to text technology is Sergey Brin. If you love reading Mr. Brin’s prose, check out US7027987 here. Once again, I am late to the Web log orgy of posts about Google’s announcement that it would process spoken text, index it, and make the text an adjunct to Google’s video search services. You can read the Google “official” Web log post here. The most important point for me in the short article was this statement:
As with all things in Labs, we will continue to experiment with new features.
The eternal beta is the bane of Google’s competitors. I expect Microsoft and Yahoo to jump into the fray as well. In the rush to emulate Google, the BBN Technologies pioneering work in this field will be overlooked. “What’s a BBN anyway” will be the rejoinders from 20 somethings intent on reinventing the wheel, fire, and suspenders. One bottleneck for voice to text has been the lack of sufficient reservoir of computing horsepower to crunch the data. Another issue is having a sufficient knowledgebase to make sense of the variants in pronunciation. Google, I surmise, believes that it has both of these issues in hand. I will keep you posted on the other horses in the voice to text search horse race.
Stephen Arnold, September 17, 2008
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