UmeSkype - Use your voice to control Skype!

treocentral.com >> Products & Reviews >> Accessories >> The Best Noise Cancellation for Both Ears

2006-07-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

theBoom Quiet reviewed on TreoCentral

UmeSkype Screencast

2006-07-03T12:16:00.000-07:00

Watch it here.

New release of UmeSkype!

2006-06-23T12:52:00.000-07:00

I am excited to announce the availability of UmeSkype v 1.0.1.0 . It has a "listening" indicator which shows whether UmeSkype is listening to you (green), or not (red). You can also toggle the listening mode using the ESC key. It will also toggle the mode automatically to not listening when you are on a call.

theBoom and theBoom O reviewed on Treocentral

2006-06-21T14:43:00.000-07:00

A detailed review of theBoom noise cancelling headsets by a Treo user.

Skype Journal: Importance of clear audio for VoIP

2006-05-31T12:49:00.000-07:00

Read more at http://www.skypejournal.com/blog/

Skype Journal: SkypeOut now Free in North America

2006-05-15T18:16:00.000-07:00

Skype's announcement today would be a welcome change for many Skype users, and the impetus for many to start using Skype.

One annoyance that people (in N. America at least) might have is that you have to type in 12 characters every time you want to dial a number (e.g. +18882303300). UmeSkype allows you to dial numbers (US/Canada) using your voice, so you just say "dial eight eight eight two three zero three three zero zero", which is way faster than clicking on the little window in Skype and typing in 12 characters. We hope that this will make UmeSkype a valuable tool for users. Some obvious enhancements such as "push-to-talk" or "push-to-activate" are in the works.

More on Speech Audio quality for Speech Recognition

2006-05-11T12:52:00.000-07:00

Audio quality is a critical factor in Speech Recognition performance. How do we define audio quality? Or to put it another way, what do we mean when we say that good quality audio is being received by the speech recognition software (or, for that matter, by the listener at the other end of an audio communications channel)?

One of the indicators of "good" audio is how closely it resembles the input audio that was intended to be transmitted. In case of speech recognition and telephone/VoIP communication, this input audio is the set of utterances spoken by the user(s) into the microphone. In more technical terms of the audio system, this can be described as having a "flat frequency response". It implies that the components of the audio signal at all the frequencies are preserved intact in the output. Speech recognition software relies on the spectrum of the audio signal to determine "what" was spoken, so the more closely the audio signal's frequency components resemble those of the user's spoken audio, the more accurate the recognition will be.

Achieving good speech recognition performance: speech audio quality

2006-05-04T14:29:00.000-07:00

When using a speech recognition system, one of the critical factors in getting good recognition accuracy is the clarity and fidelity of speech received by the computer. The speech clarity is reduced when there is background noise present near the speaker. Many noise cancelling solutions have been tried to counter this problem, such as the use of DSP technology . The main flaw with many such systems is that they reduce the noise at the expense of the fidelity of the speech, since speech and noise inherently overlap at many frequencies, especially when the noise is competing speech from other speakers in the vicinity.

This is because such systems attempt to remove the noise from the audio signal AFTER the noise and speech are already mixed together. If we could somehow remove the noise before it even gets into the signal, that would enable us to preserve all the critical features of speech, while eliminating the noise, thus sending an optimal audio signal to the speech recognizer. Such a technology has been developed and patented by UmeVoice, and is found in its line of noise cancelling headsets and microphones.

2006-04-28T08:12:00.000-07:00

The E-volution of Voicemail

Remember the time that email used to be just for conveying short messages, to be deleted when done reading? For many of us email has become much more than merely a quick communication mechanism. It is not uncommon to find inboxes with 1000s of email messages going back months, if not years. Free email service providers have had to offer larger and larger amounts of storage space to keep up with this trend. Some even offer unlimited space, so that you "never have to throw anything away". As storing email messages rather than deleting them has become more and more feasible and convenient, email inboxes have become repositories for important, and oftentimes even critical information that is not stored anywhere else.

Search technologies have evolved to accommodate the needs of this newly habituated generation of email users. You find such search technologies embedded in email clients, available as add-ons, or in the "search anything on your machine" applications that index your email messages alongside your files. This has served to further reinforce the use of email as a convenient place for leaving information that can be easily and quickly retrieved when required. Some users even deliberately email information to themselves so that it is available in the same trusty repository, accessible from virtually anywhere.

Enough said about email. What about voicemail? Technically, voicemail has been around for a while, but has remained virtually unchanged in terms of the way people use it. One primary impediment to using voicemail as a repository of information is that most voicemail interfaces still only provide sequential access to the message list, which makes navigation prohibitively time consuming. In addition, information inside a voice message is accessed sequentially, that is, by playing the message from start to end. Some amount of efficiency is gained by hunting for specific information by skipping over irrelevant parts of the message.

With the advent of voicemail in VoIP phone services and software such as Skype, there is a great opportunity for voicemail to progress to the next step in its evolution, so to speak. The ability to search through voicemails based on the subject/content of voice messages would allow people to leave information stored in the form of voice messages.

UmeSkype provides the ability to search through your Skype voice mails by date and by caller. We have tried to make it easy for people to speak the queries by saying phrases like: "find voicemails from john last month" or "find voicemails from john on january fourth two thousand six". We hope that this is just a start to what can be done to realize the full potential of voicemail as a knowledge/information repository.

2006-04-24T17:27:00.000-07:00

The Promise of Speech Recognition?

Many of us watched Captain Kirk or Scotty on Star trek ask the ship's computer "computer, where is the ship's engineer?", or Captain Picard tell his food synthesizer to make him an "Earl grey, hot!" How far are we from such a scenario?

Anandtech has a good article on the current state of the art as reflected by two of today's leading speech recognition application suites from the standpoint of accuracy and performance.

Recognizing speech accurately is one aspect of speech recognition, and "natural language understanding" is quite another. While we are still quite a long way from achieving true natural language understanding by computers, there are tremendous opportunities to create intuitive interfaces for humans to interact with computers.

UmeSkype embodies an attempt to identify high level tasks that users perform in specific applications (in this case Skype) and provide a spoken interface to them.

2006-04-21T10:31:00.000-07:00

UmeSkype features overview part 1

Calling Skype contacts

When you start up UmeSkype, the contacts tab shows 2 columns:
the voice alias and the skype handle. The first time you run
UmeSkype, the voice aliases will all be identical to the skype
handles. This means that there could be voice aliases that
are difficult for you to say, as well as for the speech recognizer
to understand.

You can change any voice alias in windows explorer style
by "slow double-clicking" on an alias (i.e. click, wait, and click again),
and then typing in the new alias when it becomes editable.

You should use create voice aliases that are both
familiar to you and easy to pronounce for you.

2006-04-20T16:52:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the UmeSkype blog!

UmeVoice is proud to be part of the wave bringing practical
speech recognition applications into the world. Our aim is
to create natural, intuitive language that people can use
to communicate with applications on their computer.
UmeSkype is one product of this effort.

In this blog we intend to share and discuss UmeSkype's features,
future plans, user impressions, user requests, and anything
else that relates to UmeSkype, including speech recognition,
user interfaces, and accessories like noise cancelling headsets.

Hope to generate some interesting discussion!