DIGITAL DICTATION, DOCUMENTS & DATA
of the mainstays, certainly for commercial dictation applications, he added.
He noted that doctors have persevered, and because they have persevered, “and in some cases had to – particularly in the US where everything has to be recorded – the dictation systems have made progress and been widely used”.
He stated that advances have also been made in transcription and more general conversation systems (where a computer can listen to two humans having a conversation or it can be one of the participants).
In fact, Prof Young feels that the challenges in developing these technologies are now moving more from transcribing the audio into words, which has been the focus for the last 30 years, into actually understanding what the words mean and the semantics behind them, especially with regards to conversational systems.
“I would expect that what has been started by Siri and Google Now is going to expand and we’re going to see a whole plethora of agents being available for having conversations about booking hotels and restaurants,” he said, “but particularly in healthcare, as this is the field which is ripe for providing this type of service.
“I think we’ll start to see these coming in within the next few years in focused application areas and then becoming more and more general and widely acceptable over the next decade.”
Conversational systems
Currently, Prof Young is working on developing conversational systems – not specifically in healthcare yet – to access tourist information.
“For example, finding a restaurant or hotel,” he told us, “and we’ve been working with some automobile companies to develop in-car voice recognition.”
He outlined that with many people getting used to satnavs, in the future people may be able to talk to their cars and say: ‘I’d like to stop off and have a meal, what is there in the local area?’ The car would then be able to search and book into wherever it finds appropriate, after a conversation with the driver about the available options.
“We’re working on that now and many of the algorithms we’re starting to develop are not rule based,” said Prof Young.
“Traditionally these types of things have been developed by a programmer sitting down and writing rules, such as ‘what would the user ask?’ And ‘how should the system respond?’ But this
He added that conversational systems are particularly interesting, and believes that the use of automation if it is done “sensibly and effectively”, could make a big impact in the future care of the elderly and in managing an ageing population.
Despite dedicating 35 years to research in the field of speech recognition, and with his research helping to set global standards for benchmarking systems and being the basis of many commercial systems, Prof Young remains modest about his award, joking that organisations sometimes feel they have to give them out “just because someone has been around long enough”.
Nevertheless, he said he is “humbled” to become the 2015 recipient of the IEEE James L Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award.
doesn’t scale and the system you deploy doesn’t get any better. What we want to do is deploy systems that learn from their own users and get better and more competent automatically, and that really is the focus of my work now.”
Professor Steve Young
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opinion@nationalhealthexecutive.com
national health executive Sep/Oct 14 | 73
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