Amazon’s Echo and Echo Dot and their voice alter-ego, Alexa, pretty much reached star status over the holidays. The voice-activated devices are very good listeners, and as long as you say the right words, Alexa will carry out your commands for everything from answering questions and playing music to buying stuff off Amazon…or even ordering a pizza.
At ExhibitOne, we love this type of thing. Whether your digital assistant of choice is Siri, Cortana, Alexa or Google Assistant, it’s simply amazing what the spoken word can do.
Which is all well and good for our personal use, but what about commercial applications?
As we keep our eyes and ears open for the latest and greatest, we wanted to give a shout-out to Minneapolis, MN-based SpeechGear.
Their award-winning voice-based translation platform should be of interest to any commercial enterprise or government agency operating in a multilingual environment.
SpeechGear’s relevance in the courtroom is what initially caught our attention. With proper integration, the platform can be used to manage and instantaneously translate conversations to and from more than 35 languages. AND in the process, generate a digital transcript of the entire conversation.
One of the largest court systems in the country has looked at this type of a solution to help alleviate the tremendous stress that language interpretation is putting on their system. The lack of resources, inability to find qualified interpreters, the large number of languages and heavy utilization, all point to leveraging technology to better meet everyone’s language interpreting needs.
We are also enthusiastic about SpeechGear’s ability to help clients with ADA compliance needs. Through SpeechGear’s suite of technologies, users can support the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities by instantly close captioning conversations. Those with difficulty speaking can have their typed words spoken, and those who have difficulty typing or writing can use their voice to scribe text.
Pretty powerful stuff.
There’s no question that the Siri- and Alexa-like technologies are very impressive and quickly evolving to where keyboards may soon become an arcane relic. But at least for now, in our view, those capabilities come up short for the demanding language management needs that confront many of our clients.
Whether it’s a courtroom, classroom or corporate office, an enterprise-grade solution that enables the natural flow of two-way conversation in multiple languages is, in a word, amazing. Asombroso. Incroyable. Tolle. Kinh ngạc. 惊人.
