Last week AOL Moviefone added speech recognition to its New York City and New Jersey locations, with plans to roll it out to more than 35 major markets over the course of the next year. To try it out, we called up the service, pressed a key to get to the movie selection menu that shouts, “please say the name of the movie you would like to see now,” and replied “Frequency.” Moviefone then asked us to say our ZIP code; once we did, the service started to read us a list of nearby theaters and showtimes. You can even say your credit-card information (for security reasons that should be obvious, you should use the touch-tone keypad instead).
According to Moviefone, the speech-recognition software provided by Lucent’s Bell Labs can accurately handle a wide range of voice pitches and accents, while screening out background noise or echoes. We decided to really put the new service through its paces: even when we adopted a couple of fake accents, it successfully recognized the sappy chick flick “Return to Me” and the testosterone-fueled action thriller “U-571.” And Moviefone politely informed us that “Gladiator” hadn’t yet opened, but was coming soon. But it stumbled repeatedly on “The Idiots,” a Danish art film that the service loudly insisted was “Committed” or “Everest.” We prefer the Web-site version, moviefone.com, but we still gave Mr. Moviefone a thumbs-up. Let’s hope he doesn’t start imitating HAL next year.
