Talking to my TV every evening may sound crazy but it’s true – when there’s no-one else to talk to, a TV set will do the songwriter wrote, but soon the citizens of Orlando, Florida will be able to talk to their television sets with some purpose. Time Warner Cable Inc, setting up that interactive television trial in Orlando, has signed Bolt Beranek & Newman Inc’s BBN Hark Systems Corp, Cambridge, Massachusetts to do a system for adding speech recognition into the Full Service Network and make a working prototype for late in the Orlando trial. The idea is for its Hark speech recognition software to speech-enable the user interface so subscribers can simply say Go to the movie channel, and the set-top converter box will tune to the sports channel – no, no, it will all work perfectly. Potential uses also include video-on-demand, home shopping, video games and interactive services such as education and on-line financial services.
