Intelligent voice technology promises a wonderful prospect on the Chinese market in the coming five years and expects to play an important role in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.

Walking along streets in some major Chinese cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hefei, one may easily find fashionably-dressed young people do shopping while listening to their cell phones for e-mails, weather forecasts and tourism and sports information.

One may also see somebody listening to auto-radio about news and novels downloaded from the Internet while driving a car.

Now in China intelligent voice services are becoming a fashion on the Internet and in posts and telecommunications and financial sectors. Intelligent technologies are also used for car GPS (global positioning system) navigators, personal computers (PCs), cell phones and even books and toys.

Wang Pingyuan, a veteran writer with a Beijing-based newspaper, feels he's too old and it's too troublesome to learn how to use a word processing system on PCs. When he happened to use a speech recognition software, he said excitedly, "With the software, I just read my stories to the PC and they will be saved onto the machine."

"If I want to surf the Internet, the only thing I need to do is to speak out the website. It's marvelous," he added.

Sun Wei, an advertisement manager and a tourist with his own car in east China's Nanjing City, has loaded a car voice navigation device.

"No matter where I go, in or outside my city, the device will tell me the best path to choose in voice, provided the target place is on the map memorized in the device," he said.

Rough statistics show that voice-based information and consulting services offered by the telecom, banking, social welfare, transport, power supply and education sectors numbered more than 3,000 nationwide over the past two years, with about 10,000 voice service hotlines operating every day.

PCs and cell phones with an intelligent voice system have been well received among more and more Chinese consumers. Qirui-QQ, a sleek compact car model, has a design of intelligent voice operating system, and has sold well in the domestic market.

The development of Internet has promoted wider application of intelligent voice technologies, involving speech synthesization, speech recognition and coding and decoding, industry experts say.

"In the near future, voice-controlled home electric appliances and traffic control services will enter the daily life of the Chinese people," said Dr. Liu Qingfeng with China University of Science and Technology based in Hefei City, east China's Anhui Province.

Two years ago, Liu, 31, developed world-class intelligent voice technology. And now the related products claim a share of more than 80 percent on the domestic securities and telecom markets. Heand his company of information technology (IT) are sponsoring the formulation of a Chinese voice technology standard.

Liu's IT company is now undertaking the voice technology project for a "multiple language information service system" designed for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

"The project will help anybody efficiently get a wide range of affordable, customized voice services without language barriers atany time and any place," Liu said.

Liu has classified the application areas of intelligent voice technologies into three categories. They are technologies used for desktop PCs, which concern voice PC operating, news and novels reading, language learning, proofreading and game play; for information services, which involve Internet and banking, social welfare and transport; and for such embedded devices as car phones and GPS systems and personal digital assistants (PDAs).

Statistics provided by China Internet Data Center show that in the coming five years, the voice system may take a market share of100 billion (US$2.05 billion) worth on the

The promising market potential of voice technologies has attracted much attention at home and from abroad.

The municipal government of Shanghai intends to make full use of intelligent voice technologies for the 2010 World Expo to be held in the city.

(Xinhua News Agency May 1, 2004)