We are therefore looking at ways to improve speech recognition performance in several key areas and its integration with the user interface. We are also exploring the area of music classification, clustering and eventually understanding. We believe that the amount and type of multimedia content on the Web is ready to explode and that new modalities to interact with this content will be needed.
Speech recognition provides an interesting way to access, classify and index spoken content.
It currently indexes more than 10,000 hours of content and it is possibly the largest such index on the Web. More information can be found here . The integration of computer capabilities into home appliances such as a digital VCR or MP3 jukebox increases the complexity of the user interface. We believe that speech recognition can play a role in reducing this complexity. Our focus however is on using speech to improve the information retrieval aspects of the user interface rather than to provide command and control functionality.