STATE-of-the-art voice recognition software may help you with telephone banking or booking a holiday. But it doesn’t impress Takeo Igarashi. For him it’s grunts, hums and tum-tee-tums that count.
Igarashi, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, reckons such non-verbal utterances are the way to control personal computers and navigate through call-centre systems. Instead of having to speak carefully and deliberately to make a voice recognition system understand you, Igarashi wants to use what he says are the much more distinctive properties of pitch and duration in our “huhs”, “mmms” and “uh-ohs”.
Voice recognition programs typically measure the frequency variation…
