« robot fighting video | Main | Quaero: Europe-funded multimedia search engine »
April 8, 2006
In-Car information from the Web: Siemens and SmartWeb project
This press release describes the SmartWeb system. The new system is being developed by experts from the Siemens Corporate Technology Division in Munich and engineers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Device Architecture and Software Technology (FIRST) in Berlin. The vehicle prototype from the SmartWeb project will be on display for the first time at the CeBIT computer trade show March 9-15 in Hanover.
Examples of the use of such a system include finding the lowest gas prices on your route, finding sports scores, or any other internet information that normally resides in tables on web pages.
I found two aspects of the system description interesting:
- They automatically generate voice dialog systems directly from tables on web pages containing different types of information.
Once the system finds an appropriate table, the program automatically converts it into a voice dialog application by accessing a phonetic lexicon, as well as a voice model that was automatically generated from the contents previously compiled from the Internet.
- Rather than providing interactive services from a website, the system downloads all the tables of information directly to the in-car computer. Then the user interacts with the car without latency or dependency on the net.
Siemens is targetting such a system to reach market in 10 years. Ajay Juneja, founder of Speak With Me, (see my previous post on Speak With Me) who pointed me to this announcement, says he can likely have such technology in cars within the next 2 years. I expect the data transmission parts could take longer than the voice technology.
Posted by barney at April 8, 2006 3:32 PM
This entry was posted in the following categories: Human Language Technology , Search
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.barneypell.com/blog/mt-tb.cgi/62
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)