ejTalk article is featured

Emmett J. Coin is featured in the May/June 2002 issue of SpeechTEK Magazine.

Known to have opinions and to be quite willing to share them, Emmett has written a thought provoking piece contrasting the differences between speech recognition technology and the paradigms of Conversation Management (CM).

The article is titled "Speech is NOT Dialog" and explains in non-technical terms what the tasks of recognition and dialog are:

"Speech Recognition (ASR) operates in the domain of one utterance, and Conversation Management (CM) is the realization of one specific chain of utterances out of a large pool of potential chains. Much like DNA defines which amino acids are assembled linearly as beads-on-a-string that subsequently fold into incredibly complex 3D objects we call proteins. Utterances strung together fold into conversations. If you can bear one more analogy: ASR is to CM as standing is to walking."

Emmett goes on to propose what some of the next, logical steps should be:

"A Conversation Manager (CM) that learns conversations may become practical. Today most ASR engines learn phonemes and words by listening to a human-annotated set of natural human utterances. It has been a long time since anyone has written a program to recognize the vowel “ah.” This may also be the most effective way to capture the natural characteristics of real conversation. Humans would annotate a large corpus of natural conversations between humans. Offline analysis would discover the patterns and compute the probabilities. Then, using these analyses the CM could predict statistically, the most likely conversational move that a real human would have made."

The full article is available online to registered (free) subscribers of SpeechTEK Magazine: http://www.speechtechmag.com/pub/