Page 355 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

The Future of Asterisk

We’ve come to love the Internet, both because it is so rich in content and inexpensive,
and, perhaps more importantly, because it allows us to define how we communicate.
As its ability to carry richer forms of media advances, we’ll find ourselves using it more
and more. Once Internet voice delivers quality that rivals (or betters) the capabilities
of the PSTN, the phone company had better look for another line of business. The
PSTN will cease to exist and become little more than one more communications pro-
tocol that the Internet happily carries for us. As with most of the rest of the Internet,
open source technologies will lead this transformation.

Speech Processing

The dream of having our technical inventions talk to us is older than the telephone
itself. Each new advance in technology spurs a new wave of eager experimentation.
Generally, results never quite meet expectations, possibly because as soon as a machine
says something that sounds intelligent, most people assume that it is intelligent.
People who program and maintain computers realize their limitations and, thus, tend
to allow for their weaknesses. Everybody else just expects their computers and software
to work. The amount of thinking a user must do to interact with a computer is often
inversely proportional to the amount of thinking the design team did. Simple interfaces
belie complex design decisions.
The challenge, therefore, is to design a system that has anticipated the most common
desires of its users, and that can also adroitly handle unexpected challenges.

Festival
The Festival text-to-speech server can transform text into spoken words. While this is
a whole lot of fun to play with, there are many challenges to overcome.
For Asterisk, an obvious value of text-to-speech might be the ability to have your tel-
ephone system read your emails back to you. Of course, if you’ve noticed the somewhat
poor grammar, punctuation, and spelling typically found in email messages these days,
you can perhaps appreciate the challenges this poses.
One cannot help but wonder if the emergence of text-to-speech will inspire a new
generation of people dedicated to proper writing. Seeing spelling and punctuation er-
rors on the screen is frustrating enough; having to hear a computer speak such things
will require a level of Zazen that few possess.
Speech recognition

If text-to-speech is rocket science, speech recognition is science fiction.

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