Speech and audio in window systems: when will they happen?
Authors: Arons B. , Schmandt C. , Hawley M. , Ludwig H. , Zellweger P. 
Published: November 2005

Good afternoon. Boy, I can't see anything out there. I assume
you all can see me -- thats why these lights are here. My name is
Chris Schmandt from the Media Lab at MIT. I'm co-chairing this
panel with Barry Arons, who is sitting over here. It's actually
quite a pleasure to co-chair this panel with Barry. We've been
working together off and on for more years than I care to
remember.
This panel has a long ridiculous name. Basically it's about
audio and window systems and workstations. I'm wearing two hats
here. I'm going to spend a minute or two introducing the panel and
then I'm going to spend some time talking about my own segment of
the panel.
We're going to try to be a panel as opposed to a series of five
mini-papers that never get published. In other words, we're going
to try to keep our presentations relatively short, then segue into
a series of prepared questions that the panelists are going to
answer amongst themselves. Then we'll open the floor up for
questions.
In some ways this is a very incestuous crew. We've all known
each other for quite a while. We have different slants and we're
actually going to try to focus on those slants a little bit. So if
we disagree with each other, that doesn't necessarily mean we
really hate each other. We're all friends.
Where this panel is coming from is a surge of interest in audio,
and multimedia, in general, in computer workstations. The Macintosh
has had audio for quite a while -- you may or may not choose to
call that a workstation. The NeXT computer sort of surprised people
by having fairly powerful DSP and audio in and out. You'll get a
demo of that later if you haven't seen it. The Sun SPARCStation has
come out with some primitive digital record and playback
capabilities.
On the other hand, there's been interest in voice in computer
workstations for years and years, and what we've seen so far is
that voice really hasn't had very much success. There have been a
number of products that have come and gone. What has become popular
has been centralized service -- specifically voice mail. Voice mail
is tied in more to a PBX -- and the interface is more like a
telephone than it is a mouse and window system, in the computer
workstation interface.
Obviously, window systems are here to stay. We're not suggesting
that audio is going to replace the graphical paradigm, but rather
have to interact with it.
On the other hand, everybody has a telephone. People had
telephones on their desks before they had workstations, and we talk
all the time at work. Voice really is a fundamental component of
the way we talk, the way we interact with each other.
What we're seeing in terms of the technologies showing up in
these workstations is higher bit rate coding. Gone are the days of
unintelligible low bit rate linear predictive coding or something
like that -- except for specialized applications.
Speech recognition is here, but it's in its infancy.
Text-to-speech -- it's around, it's difficult to understand. You
can learn to understand it.
Telephony is obviously part of this set-up if we're dealing with
audio. We don't know whether it's going to be analogue or digital.
Is it going to be plain old telephone or is it going to be
ISDN?
Those are some of the issues that we're going to be talking
about in this session. As I say, we're going to try to keep each of
the speakers to a relatively short period -- and now I can put on
my other hat. (puts toy plastic headset on -- laughter)
Some people ask me whether speech recognition is a toy or not.
Yes, it is. It's sort of a fun toy. Speech technologies are in
general fun. I was originally hoping to be able to play this out to
the audience. But I don't think it's going to work well enough.
This is actually a kid's toy -- $50 at Toys R Us. Speaker
Independent Isolated Word Speech Recognizer -- "yes", "no", "true",
and "false". It will take you on tours about dinosaurs and things
like that.
From my point of view, the key for what we can do with voice has
to do with understanding its advantages and disadvantages and the
comcomitant user interface requirements leading us to design
reasonable applications for it.
Voice has some advantages. It's very useful when your hands and
eyes are busy; you're looking at a screen, you have your fingers on
the mouse. Sometimes it's intuitive; we learn to talk at a very
early age. People talk to their computers even if the computers
don't have speech recognition. (laughter) Usually it's expletives
-- especially with UNIX. (laughter) Voice really dominates
human-to-human communication. No matter what we're doing with
E-Mail and FAX, the bottom line is we just still have to spend a
certain amount of time physically speaking to each other.
Telephones are everywhere. If I can turn an ordinary pay phone
into a computer terminal, suddenly I have access from all over the
place.
From my own work, this suggests a heavy focus on
telecommunications. The kinds of systems that I'm building are
really designed to use voice in a communications kind of
environment. On the other hand, there's many, many disadvantages of
voice. It's very slow. 200 words per minute, 150-250 words per
minute. That's less than a 300 baud modem and who uses those any
more.
Speech is serial. You have to listen to things in sequence. It's
a time varying signal by definition. And it requires attention. You
have to listen to what's going on, as opposed to simply scrolling
it by and stopping it occasionally.
My way of characterizing this is to say that speech is "bulky".
Yes, it takes up space on the file system, but most importantly you
can't "grep" it, you can't do keyword searches on it. It's hard to
file, it's just hard to get any kind of handle on it. It takes
time.
Finally, speech broadcasts. If my workstation is talking to me
and you're sitting in my office, you're going to hear what it says,
which is very different from if it appears as text. In fact, if it
appears as text, and I'm sitting in front of the screen with these
kinds of tiny bit map fonts that we tend to use, I'm probably not
even going to be able to read it -- much less you.
This has some user interface implications. One is that it
suggests that we would like, where possible, to have graphical
access to sounds. I'm going to show a video in just a second,
showing you an interface to audio built under the X Window System,
designed to give you some kind of a graphical context, so you can
mouse around and perhaps use some visual cues to keep track of
where you are in the sound. If you could roll the first piece of
one-inch, please.
This is a sound widget.