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![[Juzz Phone]](26lead.gif)
![[Juzz Phone]](26lead2.gif)
JuzzFone: "Please state your Zodiac."
Me: "I'm an Arian."
JuzzFone: "You are a Taurus?"
Me: "No... I said Arian!"
JuzzFone: "Sorry. I am not able to understand your request. Please select your zodiac sign from the list given below." (Reads out the entire Zodiac)
Me: "I said ARIES!"
JuzzFone: "Taurus - always the first to intervene in a fight, you must..."
Me: "Thanks for nothing. *&#* you!"
JuzzFone: "Thank you".
This was roughly the gist of a conversation I had with the JuzzFone voice controlled system somewhere in Chennai from my office in Mumbai. Having heard about India's first natural dialogue voice controlled portal, I was extremely excited to try out WAP's big brother out in person. I was, and still am, disappointed.
For those who think voice control is a sort of verbal hypnosis, here's some information. JuzzFone is brought to you by Antarix applications (AXIS). The objective behind developing this service is to break the Internet away from the shackles of PCs and other modern devices like WAP phones and hand control, to the best interface known to man: the voice.
So what does AXIS do? It collaborates with Philips Speech Processing (PSP) and samples 3000 different user voice clips to engineer a system that not only understands spoken 'Indian English' but also replies in the same. So far, so good. This easily beats the antique dictation software that need training and fails to recognise voices other than that of the trainer's.
Coming back to my disappointment. I confess I spoke to it with an accent that can only be acquired by a cowboy spending about five years in Hampshire. It failed to recognise my yells of 'Aries'. Fair enough. So I dropped the accent and said 'Aries' in the most perfect 'Indian English' you've heard. What do I get? The system slots me as a Taurus and reads me my bullish future for the coming week!
I tried again, this time with the news (as of May 2001, only the 'Horoscope' and 'News' sections have been activated). The system read me the news menu with agonising slowness and I had to make three choices, each taking about ten seconds before I could get to my first news article. One wonders why one would spend a rupee on the phone call and about 30 seconds just to look for a headline when newspapers still exist.
The voice recognition software might have taken months of R&D, but certainly wouldn't stand the Captain Spock test every time he'd have said: "Spock to Bridge. Activate teleporter. Energize". Sharp-eared Spock would never get teleported, or, worse still, would probably reach the heart of the sun and promptly combust. The software also has trouble understanding rapidly spoken words, and has a supremely annoying habit of repeating itself.
The 'Speech Understanding' component determines which sequences of words are most meaningful, by first converting word graphs into concept graphs, and then finding the optimum path through it. A 'Dialog Control' component is the core of the system, giving the application a human touch.
In all fairness, the voice does sound 'Indian-English'. The female-voice that answered me sounded just a little mechanical. Pauses between words were noticeably long-drawn but it was never rude to me -- even when I called it names for classifying me as Taurean (the cheek!).
Other services are expected when JuzzFone does reach all the major cities. On the cards are weather forecasts, exam results, railway enquiry, stock quotes and even an e-mail reader. They all sound great, but one can't help wondering if the consumer will trust their results and stock queries with a software that isn't completely fool-proof. Another glaring problem is the absence of a Hindi interface for the non-English speaking consumer.
Using voice as an interface could prove a huge step for the Internet. With giants like Philips in the picture, optimism is in the air. After all, you "gotto admit it's getting better…it's gettin' better all the time".
For the sake of the consumer and JuzzFone, let's hope that it gets better sooner than later.
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