Census Counts On A Sound Advance
The Age
Tuesday August 7, 2001
AS 30,000 census collectors hit every highway and byway this month to count us, they will be connected to their managers through voice technology developed by a Melbourne company.
Visible Voice, an offshoot of South Melbourne's Redflex Group, provided 2575 voicemail boxes to collectors and their group leaders in the lead-up to tonight's census.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) collectors' voice messages over the next few weeks will be stored on a rack mount dual Pentium III server running Windows NT from where daily progress reports are sent to leaders and burned on to CD-ROM. ABS management can also issue voice memos about local conditions - the onset of a flood for instance - to staff in the field.
ABS director of the population census, Andrew Henderson, said the system would be deployed in all states and territories except the Northern Territory and South Australia. The decision to use voicemail came during a dry run of 40,000 homes in Victoria last year, he said.
``It allows (group leaders) to manage their time a lot better so they can talk to us when it suits them," Henderson said. ``VV gives us a lot of control; once it is in, we can administer it ourselves."
The system has been prepared using Visible Voice's VV Builder rapid application development suite, which enables non-programmers to build software using a point-and-shoot graphical interface. Objects, pre-written mini applications that perform predetermined functions, displayed as icons, are pulled into a development window and linked to create the program. Although VV Builder is written in the C++ programming language, there is no need for an application developer to enter lines of code.
The 20-person company has tied itself to Microsoft's Windows, integrating with NT on the server and Outlook at the user or client end.
Visible Voice business development manager, Robert Kopp, said the technology could extend beyond voice mailboxes to areas where Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) has been mooted. Voice is a more natural interface than a fiddly numeric keypad with its limited display capability.
Visible Voice is working with Australian and Asian telecommunications providers to offer unified messaging services, bonding voice mailboxes, e-mail, e-commerce, the Web and speech synthesis.
Visible Voice has developed a middle level that enables the FAAST text-to-speech voice synthesiser from US company, Fonix, to talk to Intel's Dialogic telephony boards. The software could be sold into Intel or Fonix sales channels overseas.
Early applications cover diverse fields, from Monash University's student library loans system to merchant e-commerce services. On the road, salespeople could hear stock levels in the warehouse before ordering. Victorian hunters and fishermen will renew their licences, hearing the database details spoken to them as they make their selections on the phone keypad. An application service provider will launch a unified messaging service with speech component in a few days, Kopp said.
One possibility is subscription Web surfing through a voice portal. Kopp said a government department plans to launch a voice-surfing portal in November. Text, such as news headlines or stock quotes, will be pulled off a website, processed with the Visible Voice engine and then recited to any handset over the public or mobile telephone network.
McKinsey & Co management analyst predicts the market for text to speech applications will be worth more than $2 billion by 2006.
``The advantage of the Fonix product is you can take it outside telephony and embed the software in appliances," Kopp said.
The text to speech engine could be included in a mobile phone, reducing the amount of bandwidth required to the network. A phone that was constantly connected to a so-called 2.5G wireless network such as the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) need not use much more data capacity than the GSM network, often limited to 9600 bits per second. The text data would be streamed to the handset to be read aloud by the embedded speech synthesis software. This lends itself to applications such as direction finding and in-car navigation, Kopp said.
LINKS
www.visiblevoice.com.au
www.fonix.com
www.abs.gov.au
© 2001 The Age
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