IBM foresees smart appliances to come out this year

Smart appliances that will allow one to speak to a toaster. Or smart automobiles that will enable voice to replace manual control panels for hands-free driving.

These are but some of the applications which IBM predicts will come of age this year – a year of great momentum for the shift from the graphical user interface (GUI) to conversational user interface (CUI).

Other applications which consumers are most likely to enjoy in 2001, according to IBM, is machine translation, which will allow users to turn their speech and text from one language to another and transforming e-mails and web pages into the language of their choice; speaker identification that will allow one to use his voice instead of numeric codes to verify his identity and gain security access; and natural language understanding that will enable users to literally have dynamic conversations with machines like they do with other humans.

Smart appliances will allow consumers to simply use their voice to speak to a variety of workplace and home devices, such as toasters, refrigerators, and photocopiers.

Meanwhile, with cellular phone use while driving being outlawed, voice will begin to replace keypads and other manual control panels as a superior, hands-free interface for increased safety and convenience. These vehicles will be networked wirelessly to provide a range of telematics services – including traffic information, directions, diagnoses of car troubles and automatic scheduling of service appointments, and web page and e-mail access – all using dynamic voice as the interface, IBM said in a statement.

Using its advanced machine translation technology, IBM just launched a new software that will help to remove language as barrier to global communication and e-commerce. The IBM WebSphere Translation Server will enable enterprises to provide Web pages, e-mail messages and chat conversations in multiple languages in real time.

Using this software, enterprises can create and distribute web content globally without the need for special web pages or separate web infrastructure. It also enables chats in multiple languages for both internal and external communications.

"Machine translation allows for dynamic business content to be created at a fraction of the cost of professional translation services. At present, the machine translation industry consists mainly of small segmented players, with no clear leader. IBM’s entry signifies a major turning point and will help validate and accelerate the adoption of machine translation, a software market projected to reach $378 million by 2003," according to Steve McCLure, vice president for speech and natural language software of the International Data Corp. (IDC), a leading private research group.

The new software supports bi-directional text translation between English and French, German, Spanish and Italian, as well as from English to Chine (both simplified and traditional), Japanese, and Korea. It is expected to be available this March.

Last year, IBM relaunched and expanded its telephony and voice recognition product lines, making it the only company to provide a truly end-to-end voice technology platform in the marketplace.

In 1998-1999, the company began to embed speech technology in other applications, such as telephones and PDAs, to make voice a pervasive feature of the computing world. Three years’ ago, it introduced ViaVoice 98, achieving a breakthrough implementation of natural language understanding, helping machines to understand and respond to humans. IBM is the world’s information technology company. In the Far Eastern Economic Review’s list of top Asian companies and multinationals under its annual Review 200 readership survey. IBM was viewed by executives and professionals in Asia and in the Philippines as a leading multinational in the region for its overall corporate leadership stature, leadership qualities, and management style.