Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/081092/0810310.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6KB | 120 lines

                                                                                TECHNOLOGY, Page 45

The Machines Are Listening


Computers can't take dictation, but they may already understand
speech well enough to take your job

By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT -- With reporting by Sam Allis/Boston


    In its television debut on ABC's Good Morning America,
Casper the talking (and listening) computer was everything one
would expect of a digital servant -- friendly, eager to please
but slightly hard of hearing. Morning host Joan Lunden,
demonstrating Casper's capabilities on an Apple Macintosh
computer, was able to persuade the system to program her VCR
simply by talking into a microphone -- although she had to
repeat "Casper, accept program!" several times before the
machine finally got the message. When the technology is
perfected, say Apple executives, computers will be able to act
on their human masters' every command, whether it be to pay the
phone bill, schedule a lunch date or fetch the electronic mail.

    But the technology looked a lot less cute and friendly to
telephone operators in June as AT&T installed similar systems
in Seattle and in Jacksonville, Florida. The phone company has
developed a computer system that can recognize words like
"collect" and "person to person" about as well as any human. By
the end of 1994, when AT&T is scheduled to finish deploying the
new equipment across the U.S., it plans to close 31 offices and
eliminate up to one-third of the jobs now held by 18,000
long-distance operators.

    Although still in its infancy, the technology that enables
machines to understand human speech may ultimately have as much
impact on the way people do their work -- and whether some of
them still have work -- as any advance since the computer. The
ultimate goal of speech-recognition researchers -- what they
call their Holy Grail -- is an automatic dictation machine that
can listen to normal conversational speech and turn it into
perfectly typed text. Such a system could carry out much of the
work currently done by millions of human typists, transcribers,
reporters, secretaries and stenographers.

    Automatic typewriters are probably still decades away. But
there has been rapid progress in the underlying technology
during the past few years, and even with the severe limitations
of today's equipment there are now voice-recognition systems
doing real tasks -- and in some cases replacing real workers --
at hundreds of sites across the U.S. Among those tasks:


    SORTING MAIL. The U.S. Postal Service uses
voice-recognition systems in 30 big postal centers to sort
bundles that cannot be processed by its automatic equipment. A
human reads the ZIP codes off the labels, and the system directs
the packages to the proper chute. The Postal Service figures it
is cheaper to buy a computer to do the job than to train people
to memorize which ZIP codes correspond to which locale.


    AUTHORIZING TRANSACTIONS. American Express has 500 human
operators to field calls from retailers who do not have
electronic equipment to get approvals. These employees verbally
authorize 2.5 million charge-card transactions a month. Some of
the authorizations are now being given by computers that ask for
account numbers and purchase prices and then check cardholders'
accounts automatically.


    TRADING STOCKS. Stockbrokers trading U.S. government
securities at 40 sites and six major brokerage houses can now
bark their buy and sell orders into special telephones and see
their trades instantly recorded on computer screens at their
desks. Similar systems are being used by quality-control
inspectors on factory lines, by doctors filling out medical
reports and by lawyers putting together paragraphs of
boiler-plate prose.

    Voice recognition has come a long way in 20 years from the
primitive systems that had to be trained to each individual's
voice and could recognize words only when they were spoken one
at a time. The most advanced systems today look not at whole
words but at phonemes, the building blocks from which all words
are constructed. That makes it possible to decode the slurred
sentences that most people speak. The systems also use
mathematical techniques to meld dozens of sampled voices,
including male and female tones, so that the computers can
recognize phrases spoken by just about anybody.

    The main limitation on such systems is that they can deal
with only relatively small vocabularies -- usually a few dozen
words at a time. But that's enough to take orders at fast-food
restaurants or to handle toll-free calls in which a customer
must choose from a fixed list of catalog items, airline flights
or bank transfer options. More than $150 million worth of
voice-recognition systems were sold in the U.S. last year,
according to Voice Information Associates, a research firm in
Lexington, Mass., and the market is growing more than 40% a
year. The big breakthrough will come when computers that can
follow conversational speech become sufficiently powerful to
handle vocabularies of 20,000 words. That would cover 97% of the
words used in today's books, magazines and newspapers.

    Researchers argue among themselves about whether it will
be five or 10 or even 20 more years before dictation systems
are that smart. For court reporters, stenographers or anyone
else whose primary job is to put spoken words onto paper, that
time might be well spent figuring out how to adapt to the
technology -- or, if that's not possible, looking for a new
career.