| Nokia
9000 Series and Speech Recognition
ARCHIVE PAGE 1997 FOR INTEREST
 
Nokia data phone
US model above - now available and slightly larger
than European model. mobile phone with computer, 8 meg RAM,
modem, fax, e-mail and web surfing as well as short message service,
diary, word processor and other features. It is more reliable than
most PCs, requires little or no setting up, has an Internet connection
which can be programmed by radio messages and has a 30 hour battery
life on standby. It works in 140 nations and is a complete mobile
office. It fully integrates information so, for example, when someone
phones, their full contact details flash onto the screen including
a log of all incoming and outgoing calls, faxes and e-mails. Forwarding
an e-mail is as simple as pressing a button. The keyboard is a little
small but the author has written a magazine article on it and e-mailed
it to the publisher. The phone also operates as a hands free, allowing
others to take part and the user to consult the diary or make a
note. Conference calls can be set up almost instantly. It has a
serious defect which is lack of a built in camera, which would fit
in either round circle near the top of the screen.
Hewlett Packard are working on a similar device that
will be a quarter of the size or less - possible operated by speech
recognition and with a "head up" display in three dimensions
on special data glasses worn by the user. Meanwhile BT are also
working on a device worn as a wrist plate with built in colour TV
and camera, running off body heat - I wonder how long that will
take them to make.
Downloading from PC to Nokia is fast. The other day
I walked into a meeting with one of the world's largest computer
companies and confounded them all by announcing that I had in my
pocket all the latest data on one of their own products, a product
so new that even their sales team had little information. A few
seconds later I had e-mailed the lot (1.2 megabytes of text) into
their local office from the restaurant table. Networking had gathered
the information, and networking sent it on. Life will never be the
same. After surfing the net in Swiss mountain tunnel one need never
feel out of touch again.
Mind control - affecting the
brain
However the Nokia can affect one's mind profoundly.
During an intensely busy spell of international management consultancy,
which coincided with a blitz of media interviews (see human
cloning ), I found I was reacting and responding to e-mails,
faxes and other messages with delay time of only minutes for much
of the day - whether in a station, on a train, at an airport or
in a taxi or in between other meetings. It was my first taste of
being completely cybered: in total contact with the whole world
who wanted to be in touch, across time zones and cultures, even
walking down the street or sitting in the park.
Intelligent watches
When wrist watches all have the same power as the
Nokia 9000 series- or greater - with speech, data glasses and other
new input devices, we may find that human interaction begins to
change profoundly. No doubt periods of intense cyberlinking will
result in a reaction against technology, and a desire to disconnect
- even perhaps from the telephone at home when enjoying leisure.
Watches are already quite intelligent. I have a Swatch which makes
a computer say "hello Dr Dixon" as I go up to it, and
seconds later it automatically connects me to the web. The same
Swatch can automatically pass me through a ski lift, or onto a plane,
deducting value or charging my account as needed
Speech recognition is improving fast. The first systems
I worked with in the late 1970s ran on huge mainframes and had a
vast vocabulary of 30 words. You could increase this by using each
of the first 30 words as a door to open up second sets in a kind
of family tree, but it was awful to use. For over a year now I have
had full control over my portable PC using speech: "open wordpad
start dictating dear Thomas comma new line thank you for your letter
stop new paragraph I agree with you that...." The only problem
was that each word needed to be said separately and carefully. Even
though the machine learnt by experience, it was hard to do better
than 50 words a minute, and that was with some (spectacular) errors.
Now several companies are boasting new continuous
speech recognition programs able to cope with up to 145 words a
minute. I admit I was sceptical as I loaded the CD-Rom on Dragon
NaturallySpeaking but the results were astounding. First you have
to read aloud about 20 minutes of a novel. Then you give it some
chunky documents you have written, for it to study your use of language.
And then off you go. The faster you speak, the more accurate it
can be, as it likes to look at the whole context of what you are
saying before putting whole sentences together. And it learns fast.
You quickly learn the sort of words to be careful over, and when
you can string along a large number of words safely.
In that moment I saw the end of the keyboard as a
routine entry device, although it will always survive for note taking
in meetings and any other situation where quietness is important
or you don't want others to hear what you are saying. If you want
to see some results, take a look at the
article on bugging which was "written" in a few minutes
and corrected using Dragon. These speeds mean that creating the
first draft of a sizeable book will take less than fifteen hours
in the future, far faster than most authors can think.
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