If the latest issue of Speech Technology hadn’t already gone to press, you might see me running through the labyrinth that is Speech Tech HQ, whilst shouting “Stop The Presses” as a crowd of sooty-faced newsboys stared at me with awe, respect and the deepest admiration.

“What’s he doing?” one would say.

“Haven’t you heard?” another would reply. “He just broke the Squawkers McCaw story wide open!”

And then, in the jubilation and drunken ecstasy that would naturally follow, the presses would grind to a halt, the magazine would be rewritten, and the world would learn of Squawkers McCaw: the new FurReal Friend Talking Animatronics Parrot from Hasbro.

That’s Right Speech-Heads: A Voice-Recognition Powered Toy Parrot.

According to Toysunder.com, Squawkers is a sassy, startlingly realistic, plush–plumed parrot that can speak more than forty-five words, phrases and sound effects—-including his signature “Squawk, Squawk, Squawk” Song and Dance.

From the site: “By teaching additional words and phrases, you can even ‘train’ Squawkers to talk back to you, just like a real parrot. Be sure you have [his] cracker on hand when he gets hungry otherwise you’ll hear about it.”

Squawkers comes with the aforementioned toy cracker, a remote control, a perch, and “with his advanced voice recognition system, can talk in a funny, squawky voice and repeat what your child says, just like an actual parrot.”

And Squawkers doesn’t stop there. He has a host of other speech features and makes a fine companion.

I should know. When my girlfriend went away to “visit family” for the Holidays, I found comfort in Squawkers velveteen plumage and the gentle robotic coo of his voice. Many a night, he and I would sit by the fire, swapping stories and sipping mulled wine.  Ah, memories …

Squawkers McCaw is available here at Amazon.com for $81.99.

In what could be another step toward a future in which humans are enslaved to vindictive, super-intelligent robot masters, Nintendo has released a multimodal “interactive cooking coach” for Nintendo DS.

Personal Trainer: Cooking features the electronic “DS Chef,” voice-recognition technology, two hundred forty recipes from around the world, and video cooking demonstrations.

The product can teach aspiring chefs basic cooking techniques and boasts a touch screen interface that allows you to check ingredients on an electronic shopping list that can be carried to the grocery store.

Personal Trainer: Cooking also lets users search recipes based on ingredients, calorie content, or cooking time.

And, if a your hands are “accidentally” scaled with red hot cooking oil and therefore unable to poke at the touch screen, the voice recognition feature allows users to tell the DS Chef–billed as a “friendly electronic cooking instructor”–to move on to the next step or repeat the last instructions.

I don’t know about you, but Sarah Connor and I are hunkering down in our bunker, eating canned beans, and never learning to cook.

As promised, the Speech Technology News Feature about Google’s new voice search for iPhone.

A few days ago, we brought you this post about Google’s new voice search for the iPhone.

And as expected, Google is being typically reticent about this development.

But fear not, gentle reader: We at Speech Tech Blog are not done yet.

In fact, as soon as I am done with this blog post, I have a strongly worded email to send to a certain massively-powerful-and-ridiculously-secretive-company.  A company that has access to all my personal information; a company that has a record of every Internet search I have ever made; a company that will, for obvious reasons. remain nameless.

But in the meantime, check out the following links for more information on Google’s voice search for iPhone.

Official Google Blog

Official Google Mobile Blog

Google Press Center

According to a story in today’s New York Times, Google researchers have added voice recognition to their search software for the iPhone.

According to The Times, the new application will be free and available via the iTunes store.  Basically, users will be able to simply speak searches into their iPhone.  The results will then be displayed on their phone and include local information when applicable via iPhone features that detrmine user location.

We expect an announcement about this from Google, so keep your eyes peeled for a Speech Technology News Feature in the near future.

In the meantime, John Markoff’s New York Times story can be found here.

The New York Times has an article today about how cars overloaded with portable DVD players and computer keyboards are actually making the roadways considerably more dangerous.

Man. Computers? When I was ten, my parents took me on a thirteen hour roadtrip from California to Utah (Violin camp. Seriously). They played an unabridged audio book of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, which was both entertaining and educational.

According to the NY Times, the biggest causes of driver distraction leading to accidents include dialing phone numbers and texting on wireless devices. Of course, now that everyone has a wireless device, there have been a ton of TV spots advertising Ford’s voice-controlled Sync system (which uses Nuance’s speech rec technology).

The article quotes a Ford technical specialist: “Voice interface is sort of the way of the future…Voice dialing is clearly superior to dialing manually.”

Well, great. I wrote a case study about equipping police units with voice controls in the Jan/Feb issue of Speech Tech. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire, who implemented and continue to optimize the project, are also conducting research on how speech recognition influences driving ability. Andrew Kun, an associate professor in UNH’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department describes the dilemma:

So someone gives you a system with a speech recognizer and you’re now supposed to be able to drive a little more safely. But what if the recognizer isn’t very good or just isn’t performing very well? Will that hinder your ability to drive? If the question is that you now have a second task, which is talking to the computer, and it’s not going well because the computer isn’t understanding you, how much does this influence your primary task? By how, I don’t mean what goes on in your heads, I mean what are the result regarding driver performance.

When I spoke with him, they’d only completed a few WOz tests using extreme cases–44 percent and 88 percent recognition rates. As expected, very low recognition rates hindered driving ability and high recognition rates helped it. I don’t know what Sync’s recognition rate is, but I’m pretty sure it’s higher than 44 percent, otherwise I doubt they’d have deployed it.

As Kun admits, “There are a lot of variables that have to be taken into account.”

One is speech recognition rate, the other is what kind of driving do you do? Is a highway more difficult than city driving? Do you have to use the press-to-talk button? We’re trying to come up with a list of things.