Using Your Voice to Unleash the Power of the Internet
TASC Presentation - 02/21/2006

Presentation Announcement:
Dr. Emdad Khan, President and CEO of InternetSpeech, founded the company in
1998 with the vision to develop innovative technology for accessing
information on the Internet anytime and anywhere, using just an ordinary
telephone and the human voice. Dr. Khan's technical knowledge and
understanding of emerging markets has resulted in the development of Internet
Speech's first voice Internet product/service, netECHO, the only product
available today that delivers complete voice Internet access. 

Dr. Khan, a frequent speaker at voice-recognition, Internet application and
other industry trade shows and conferences, holds 14 patents, has 3 others
pending and has published more than 40 papers on the advent of voice
technology on the Internet, speech recognition, neural nets, fuzzy logic,
intelligent systems, VLSI and optics.  He has taught courses at universities
and industry conferences on VLSI, neural net and fuzzy logic. He holds a
Doctorate degree in Computer Science, Master of Science degrees in Electrical
Engineering and Engineering Management and a Bachelor of Science degree in
Electrical Engineering. 

Dr. Khan will describe and demonstrate the technology behind InternetSpeech's
products and how it has been received by many blind, visually impaired and
elderly users from various organizations, including the San Francisco's
Lighthouse for the Blind, which has incorporated the technology into their
organization, the National Federation of the Blind, and the American Council
of the Blind.

Presentation Notes by Tian Harter:
Dr. Khan began his presentation by explaining that Internet Speech is
available from any telephone. This makes the Internet available to the large
number of people that don't have computers, as well as the blind and those
who are too far from their computers to use them. The system has modes for
surfing the web, searching for information, reading email, and e-commerce. It
is one way that people can bridge the digital divide. 

Then he ran a tape of a typical user logging on and using it to visit a
website. The computer had a pleasant professional sounding female voice, and
it took the caller only a couple of minutes to get into a mode where she was
describing the page he wanted to look at. Dr. Khan explained that there was
considerable AI at work deciding which words on the page to read next. Then
he played a clip of a caller using the system to buy a box of everybody's
favorite cookies. Again, the system handled the job without any trouble. 

Dr. Khan explained that visually impaired users tend to call for about ten
minutes per call, and they tend to call several times per day. People without
computers tend to have calls about as long, but less of them. Highly mobile
professionals tend to call for much shorter periods, and only when they can't
get access to a terminal with a keyboard to accomplish their goals more
conveniently. When Internet Speech was starting out, they thought their main
customers would be mobile professionals. The blind marketplace was something
they stumbled into after that, and it has since turned out to be huge. 

Over the next year or so the company plans to expand into providing Internet
boxes for blind people and support for more languages. At the moment they are
growing and the future looks bright. 

During Q&A the following points came up:

E-commerce via Internet Speech does take some customizing of the site to
really work well. The company asks vendors to allow one to twenty-one days
for doing things like getting the dialogs and menus right before going live. 

Government likes the system a lot, mostly because it gives them an easy way
to comply with disability access laws. 

The system is currently available in English, Chinese, Japanese, and German.
There are plans to expand into providing Spanish and Arabic. 

Static text that is used over and over is done by recording a human reading
the words. Dynamic text is done by text to speech software. The system only
has one voice right now, but there are plans for more. 

Links:
Technology and Society Committee (TASC)
http://mailman.svpal.org/mailman/listinfo/tasc

InternetSpeech
http://www.internetspeech.com/

InternetSpeech Introduces Version of netECHO for Elderly and Visually Impaired
http://www.speechtechmag.com/pub/industry/1920-1.html

Emdad Khan
http://www.internetspeech.com/directors.htm

Internet for Everyone - Using a Simple Telephone and Voice, without a computer
http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2005/proceedings/2389.htm

SF Lighthouse for the Blind
http://www.lighthouse-sf.org/

National Federation of the Blind
http://www.nfb.org/

American Council of the Blind
http://www.acb.org/index.html