Using and Installing Yahoo! OneSearch Voice

As promised, here are some screen shots of Yahoo! OneSearch Voice in action on an AT&T Blackberry Pearl 8120.

Install was pretty simple. Went to http://m.yahoo.com/voice, clicked yes to a couple things and the install went ahead.

One troubling note was this disclaimer on the install page that deserves more investigation later on: "For devices that support WiFi, please make sure to turn off the WiFi option before starting the application."

I chose not to change permissions on the device at install time, so I was instead forced to approve the changes the first time I ran OneSearch.

I learned quickly that I had to hold down the Call button while speaking. Once I discovered that little detail, I was able to speak into the phone to find the status of a flight (that I am not going to be on) or look for a Sushi restaurant in town (I actually ate at the first restaurant listed last night - the Unagi was spectacular.)

What is startling about OneSearch Voice was how quickly I was able to get going with the application. Having spent a lot of time with Dragon voice recognition software recently, I was expected there would be some period of training to accustom the software to my voice. But there was none at all. The first two questions I asked it (while holding the button down, of course), I got exactly the results I was looking for.

OneSearch Voice is available now for Blackberry devices, and Yahoo! expects to have the software available via operators on new devices sometime this summer.

BeyondTrust Roots Out Bad Apps

BeyondTrust is all about solving problems that perplexed me six years ago. And I mean that as a compliment, since no one else has really addressed those problems in all this time.

Before I came to eWEEK in 2003, I worked at an IT consulting firm serving small businesses in and around San Francisco. One of our hallmarks was an early encouragement of the practice that later became known as "Least Privileged User." Basically, we persuaded a lot of clients to have their users run only with local User permissions, rather than with Administrator rights.

As a result, our customers had a lot less trouble with viruses, spyware or unwanted applications. Of course, we also had to make work all the applications they needed to use on a day to day basis -- and we ran into hundreds of applications that wanted Administrator rights, often for pretty banal reasons ("We write our preferences file in the c:\Windows directory!")

Identifying those applications that would have a permissions problem was kind of a crap shoot and I spent hundreds of (non-billable) hours poking around various apps and watching other people over their shoulders. It was hardly an effective way to identify troublesome apps, but there wasn't a tool to do it and it was bad PR for a customer to find them before we did.

And I don't even want to talk about the various things we did to actually fix the permissions problems once we discovered them. Kludgey does not even begin to describe that process.

Of course, BeyondTrust (along with a couple other companies that don't really exist anymore) helped solve the "fix" problem a couple years ago with its Privilege Manager product (formerly known as Desktop Standard's PolicyMaker Application Security). And now, finally, it is trying to solve the identification and location problem with a new product called BeyondTrust Application Rights Auditor.

Of course, Microsoft has offered a tool kit for a while that allows idividual scanning of applications for permissions issues, but that solution didn't really scale well for companies with a large application base, particularly one already deployed and in use.

With Applications Rights Auditor, BeyondTrust is looking to fill that gap. And it's free (as in beer).

The product gets deployed to a representative sample of desktops throughout an enterprise, for a two-pronged search for applications needing administrative rights. The client software first performs an inventory to identify all executable applications on each machine. The findings are then transmitted to BeyondTrust's repository, where the found applications are compared against a database of known applications and versions.

For applications that are not already in BeyondTrust's database, the client software continuously monitors unknown application as it is being used, recording and flagging specifically when (and what) Administrator privilege is required.

Administrators can then look at the inventory results of the two types of scans and run reports for individual clients or the collective to see what applications will need permissions help in a move to Least Privilege. Because all the data is stored on BeyondTrust's network, there is no need to install a local database or application server, so it should be pretty easy to get started quickly.

The hosted model scared me a little bit, for security and privacy reasons, but the folks at BeyondTrust assured me that each customer has its own unique certificate that gets generated when the customer first acquires the code. All of the agents deployed within a company transmit their data with the certificate, so all the information should be isolated from other companies' data.

Unfortunately, BeyondTrust has not yet decided to take the additional steps to make Application Rights Auditor even more valuable. Since it is collecting information specific to applications that are already in use, it makes sense that one should be able to automatically create policies based on the information provided by Auditor in order get going quickly with Privilege Manager. But of course, you can't yet do that.

The (6-Week Long) End of Typing

My recent review of Microsoft's Response Point awakened in me an interest in speech recognition technology. Microsoft's product utilized speech recognition to help users perform regular commands using only their voice -- to call contacts, check voicemail, or answer a few simple stock questions. I found the technology worked extraordinarily well -- requiring little to no voice training, making the entire experience very straightforward and easy to use.

I have been vaguely interested in speech recognition technology for the last few months as I have conducted many interviews with vendors, users, and analysts -- and have wasted many hours transcribing those interviews. My relatively slow typing speed makes transcription a tiring affair, and speech recognition technology seemed to be the perfect antidote -- saving me both time and effort. But inertia (ok, laziness) kept me from actually doing anything about it.

Fate finally handed me the perfect excuse this week, as I broke my left pinky finger while playing basketball. As it turns out, that finger is pretty important for the process of typing -- and typing is a rather large component of what I do. With the splint on my finger, my left hand has become functionally useless on a keyboard -- and I still need to write.

After performing next to no research at all, I decided to buy Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking because 1) I had heard of it, and 2) the Preferred version promised transcription of MP3 files, which would allow me to transcribe those pesky interviews.

Thanks to Amazon Prime's discount on one-day delivery, I had the software in hand the next day. Installation and initial training of the software took under an hour, and now I am writing using (mostly) only my voice, as I am still working out streamlining a combination of voice and one-handed editing. First impression -- pretty cool.

So far, what I actually find the most difficult when using the software is knowing what I'm going to say far enough in advance to form together a cohesive sentences and paragraphs that the software can better understand and punctuate. I guess that will come with time.

I assume I will be using the software frequently over the next several weeks as the finger heals, so I am sure I will have more things to say about the software later. But right now, I think I've found a godsend.