Managing Audio in Wheel Time

robk — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:13:00 GMT

Ivan Tashev (right) shows the Commute UX demo to Rick Rashid (left), senior vice president of Microsoft Research, and
Craig Mundie, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer.

Ivan Tashev, principal architect in the Speech Technology group at Microsoft Research Redmond, has one of those smiles that can light up a room, and he's flashing it repeatedly as he explains his TechFest 2009 demo Commute UX: Dialog System for In-Car Infotainment.

"In this demo," he beams, "we show natural-language-processing technologies that will allow drivers to have easy access to their songs, to their information, to their phone calls. This will increase driver satisfaction, and we believe it will lead to safer human interaction in the car."

Sounds like fun work, and it must be, because in their booth, Tashev's colleagues Mike Seltzer and Y.C. Ju are all grins, as well.

"For us, speech is the most natural choice for a human-machine interface in the car," Tashev says, "because it's an eyes-busy and hands-busy task. We have noticed that in systems deployed so far--initially on high-end cars, but lately, on most of the Ford models, built on top of the Microsoft platform--they use a very complex menu structure and they are very rigid in the commands you have to say to navigate. This is why we decided that it would be much easier to reduce the number of commands and to have a flat, 'say anything anytime' menu. We require the drivers to remember just three commands: Play, Call, Replay. That's it.

"According to our research studies, in more than 50 percent of cases, the query for music is not precise, not correct. People do not remember the exact song name. In many cases, the songs are known by completely different names than what we is written on the CD label. We have sophisticated speech-processing software that tries to match the output of the speech recognizer with the potential songs or entries in the address book and to provide the most relevant choice. For example, when people don't know the exact name, they try to add more information, usually the artist's name. Even that may not be correct. We have recorded queries like, 'Play Hey Oh by the Chili Peppers,' which is either 'play title Snow (Hey Oh)' or 'play artist the Red Hot Chili Peppers.' Our system is able to understand those two pieces of information and find the right song to play."

Tashev, Seltzer, and Ku work in close tandem with Microsoft's Automotive Business Unit.

"We get feedback from them," Tashev confirms. "They try to use our technologies and our experience whenever they find it appropriate."

And make no doubt about it: This technology is coming your way, quite possibly in your next automobile.

"We strongly believe," Tashev smiles, "that such technologies, such speech-enabled human-computer interfaces in the car, are in the process of transition from a cool gadget--something which you call your neighbor to show when you buy a new car--to an integral part of the automobile, something like air conditioning, which nobody thinks is something exceptional. To go through this transition, we have to find the proper technologies to make the spoken dialog usable for the majority of drivers, without any specific training, and able to handle human errors.

"Even with a perfect speech recognizer, the human is the major source of errors today, from non-correct queries to a desire to have faster and easier access to the information a user wants. I'd love to be able to say, 'Call Ivan at home' instead of 'Call Ivan Tashev at home,' especially if I have only one Ivan in my address book. This completely disambiguates my query."

Tashev, Ju, and Seltzer (at wheel) take their demo for a spin.

Malvar on Channel 9

robk — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 01:59:00 GMT

Channel 9, the Microsoft Developer Network's community for unfiltered access to the people who devise Microsoft technologies, is featuring a fascinating video interview with Rico Malvar, managing director of Microsoft Research Redmond. Malvar, also a Microsoft distinguished engineer, shares a funny story about how he joined Microsoft, some of the technologies that have moved from Microsoft Research into Microsoft products, and how much he enjoys TechFest.

TechFest Live! : Redmond

Managing Audio in Wheel Time

Malvar on Channel 9