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        Speech tech supports Windows devices

        Jonathan Angel | Date: Oct 1, 2008 | Comments: 1


        Agilingua announced a new version of its SDK (software development kit) for creating user interfaces combining speech recognition and voice synthesis. The Atom Spoken Dialogue SDK, version 2.5, includes a new DSP (digital signal processing framework, plus runtime engines for Windows Mobile, Windows CE, and Linux devices, the company says.



        Listening to the human voice and converting it into text via speech recognition is merely an input method, says Agilingua. In In order to achieve natural spoken interaction between a human and a computer, the following additional components are needed, the company adds:
        • A parser to analyze the recognized sentence and extract its meaning
        • A dialog manager to decide the system's behavior and response
        • A natural language generator, to convert the system's response into natural language
        The Atom Spoken Dialogue SDK is touted as including these additional elements, as illustrated below. The SDK is "especially designed for developing embedded interactive spoken dialogueue systems in multiple languages," and can cut development time by 50 to 75 percent, claims Agilingua.


        A block diagram of the Atom Spoken Dialogue architecture
        Source: Agilingua
        (Click to enlarge)

        Version 2.5 of the Atom Spoken Dialogue SDK is said to include a newly developed DSP (digital signal processing) framework, which allows developers to integrate their own noise reduction and echo cancellation algorithms with ATOM. Such algorithms can remove ambient noise from the speech being recognized, and also cancel out any echo resulting from a computer's output being re-recorded accidentally, the company says.

        Applications developed with the Atom Spoken Dialogue SDK must be created on Windows XP or Windows Vista desktop computers, but are said to be compatible with other devices via runtime engines. Newly available is a runtime for Linux (both x86 and ARM), joining existing runtimes for Windows Pocket PC 2003, Windows Mobile 5.0, Windows Mobile 6.0, Windows Mobile 6.1, and Windows CE, according to Agilingua.

        Finally, says Agilingua, it is also releasing an Atom CarNavi SDK and Atom Robot SDK, targeting in-car navigation and robots, respectively. These kits include the Atom Spoken Dialogue SDK, plus additional components, grammars, and databases necessary to implement multimodal dialog components for car navigation and robots. The Atom CarNavi SDK also offers source code to integrate with Microsoft MapPoint, the company says.

        Further information

        Agilingua's Atom Spoken Dialogue SDK, Atom CarNavi SDK, and Atom Robot SDK, all appear to be available now, though pricing was not provided. More information may appear on the company's website, here.


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