“3G & SPEECH” Reconnecting India Date:   Wednesday , January 05, 2011 3G has the potential to immensely impact almost every individual, both socially and economically. Recognizing that, all eyes are trained on how 3G in India opens the door to innovative value added services allowing everything to be accessed though just one convergent device. In a country, where broadband penetration is less than one percent, ironically mobile penetration is 45 percent. Infact, in a recent Google report, India has emerged as the second largest consumers of mobile Internet after U.S. To add another perspective to these facts, Evalueserve (‘Uptake of 3G services in India’) reports the number of 3G handsets will increase to 395 million by 2013. An indication, that in terms of reach and penetration, mobile internet along with 3G will become the chief vehicle for connectivity. 3G powering speech technology - tranforming & all-embracing Buoyed by 3G and mobile, we see many parallel stories unfold, one of which revolves around use of speech technologies to maximize the reach of mobile services. There is a large amount of information and content in the network. 3G in combination with speech interface will accelerate the access and usage of it for the masses. As we speak about the convergence of speech and 3G technologies and its importance, the challenges are also huge. l With a population of 1 billion and with just 45.1 percent mobile penetration, there is still a huge number we have not connected to yet. l Another daunting task is overcoming the illiteracy and dialect problems in India. With the largest illiterate population our rate of literacy is 65.38 percent as per the last census and a considerable portion of which is in fact semi-literate or has little or no technology prowess. l Also, the provision of internet in rural areas does not necessarily mean that people will be able to benefit from any technology. There are a range of factors to be considered, such as the availability of relevant applications and content in local languages. 3G & Speech – Transforming & all-embracing The use of speech as the primary medium to access the web through mobile and handheld devices, with the momentum of the 3G wave will be the interface that seamlessly binds the vastly diverse India – which is illiterate, semi-literate, and also is the on-the-go ‘tweeting’ kind. Inspite of the challenges, 3G and speech together have the capability to weave itself into the texture of our everyday lives in many forms and also across cross-sections of our society. To give a view of the scope of its application: l Today, government is talking about Financial and social inclusion through mobile telephony to provide a variety of services to the society. This combination will now also be capable of delivering telemedicine, m-commerce and distance education services that the government has constantly been struggling to deliver to all segments of the population. Services like Kisan Call Center – to provide agriculture related queries solutions, Weather information, complaint registrations rely on the power this combination brings to telecommunication. l Speech recognition solutions today encompass all prominent Indian regional languages, thus scaling the challenge of reaching out to a culturally diverse nation such as ours. In rural and remote areas citizen information services can be provided more effectively by using speech interfaces crossing barriers of literacy, language and infrastructure. l Providing a huge impetus to the m-governance initiatives, Voice verification aspect of speech technology can be used for unique identification and recording attendance. Voice verification can eliminate the cases of fake attendances in social schemes like NREGA. l Speech interfaces can be used to leave voice tweet messages using either data or voice channel. The backend systems use ASR to transcribe the voice tweet message to text message and send it as an SMS further. l Also, people can use speech to dictate their messages in social networking sites. Others can listen to it with the help of Text-to-speech (TTS). Users can listen to their friend’s messages and postings handsfree while they are driving. l It is also the most effective interface for blind people. They can easily browse on their mobile by just speaking to it and listening to the output with the help of TTS. Speech as the primary interface will revolutionize the concept of “user friendly interfaces”. We will see mobile devices that enhance e-mail, browsing, gaming and social networking. The experience of these services on the mobile using speech will overcome the limitations of small screen sizes, incomplete keypad, unavailability of the keyboard and cumbersome typing. For insight into how this technology can permeate all aspects of our life it is important to understand how it works. There are three components of speech technology: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-To-Speech (TTS), and Speaker Verification (SV). It is now possible to combine these three platforms with mobile Internet and multimedia technology. This combination allows rapid development and deployment of genuine multimodal applications, combining voice, visual and audio interfaces on a single mobile device and in a single session. Multimodal interfaces can be used to search and download the entertainment content like music, trailers and videos on the phone with the 3G. Web search, YouTube search and driving directions are just one click away using speech, with the help of ASR and TTS. 3G enables these services by reducing the latency in downloading the content. Conclusion Mobile, 3G, and Speech Technology are bound to open infinite avenues in terms of Communication Technology and are going to play an extremely vital role in revolutionizing our lives. It is quite apparent that the mobiles and handheld devices will be the choice of future communication. 3G will create great potential in the Indian market and speech platforms will leverage these to ensure that the web reaches to all the sections of the population making technology an integral, indistinguishable part of our lives.