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It's good to talk
- 12 Apr 07, 01:02 PM
A new breed of talking search engine, where the results of your search are read back to you aloud, is starting to appear on the web. This might prove beneficial to a range of user groups such as people with dyslexia, or learning difficulties, so we thought we would take a look.
is one such engine to look out for. After typing in your search query, the results are read out aloud from one to ten. Using the appropriate number key on the keyboard, you can then visit the web page you want. It even offers a degree of customisation. There is a male and female voice to choose from, and it is possible to select whether all the information is read out, or just the parts that are most important.
Accoona also provide a talking search tool. This is software that has to be installed, but it does mean you can search your desktop as well as the web. Getting the tool to talk is a manual process - you have to highlight the text before it is read aloud. I was quite impressed by the quality of it's human sounding voice though.
None of the search tools let you talk to them yet. There may be times when you wouldn't want to do so - like looking for haemorrhoid cream in an open plan office - but that must be the ultimate goal. The roadblock, for now, is in coming up with speech recognition software capable of identifying what is being said to it, without being trained to recognise individual voices.
These talking search engines are in their infancy, but I do believe that they are a sign of interesting things to come, especially if the conversation can become two-way.
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