Now that I have weighed in on what happened in 2009, what will happen in 2010? Here is what I think will be hot in 2010 in speech -
Hosted Applications
Hosting is going to stay hot. With companies such as Voxeo, Microsoft Tellme, Contact Solutions, Angel.com, and myriad others providing hosting as an adjunct or alternative to premises-based speech deployments, customers have a lot of safe choices for not having to do everything themselves. No longer an anomaly, I believe that we will see hosting brought up in conversation in the majority of deals in 2010, even if it’s only talked about.
I didn’t personally do a speech technology prediction column at the beginning of 2009, but one of my colleagues at Speech Technology Magazine did. Eric Barkin wrote a feature article, entitled, 2009: What the New Year Will Bring, in which he talks about the effects of the economy on speech technologies, and on some of the predictions for speech from some of my analyst colleagues. It’s debatable whether the economy has gotten that much better in a year, but that didn’t stop the speech industry from moving ahead. Harvesting nuggets from Eric’s column, here are the predictions from that column, followed by what I think did happen in his categories, along with some others that didn’t make it on his list, but made headlines in 2009 nonetheless.
It’s the end of the year for unified communications. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since I started this summation of the Twelve Days of UC. I can assure you that matching an industry to a holiday song is a feat I won’t repeat, nor try to pick a new song to parody. As with previous quarters, here is a brief summary of some of the Q4 events related to my Twelve Days categories. For the last time, here is my parodied version of the Twelve Days of Christmas.
It’s been a quarter since I blogged my industry wish list for unified communications, so I figured I would revisit the list to see how we are doing. I don’t want to make this a beauty contest as there have been so many announcements, big and small, particularly as we had a number of voice shows last quarter, but here are some highlights. One caveat; just because we have had a lot of announcements this quarter doesn’t mean we have marked anything off of the list. It just means we have made progress in several categories. Here is a recap of my December “wish list” song, and the category each line represents:
On the third day of UC the industry gave to me an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.
This wish is all about putting a microscopic lens or focus on the assistive technology (AT) side of “any time, any place, anywhere, through the device of choice”, or other catch phrases the industry has used over the years. I was inspired to add this as one of my wishes because of discussions with my blind friend, Karen Parsegian, who started to go blind about seven years ago, and had the lights go completely out on Christmas morning five years ago. Some Christmas present that was. Since then, she and I have had many discussions about what I am working on, with me (probably) boring her about unified communications and speech technologies. Now she is a veteran speech technology user herself, as a good proportion of her communications life revolves around having text-to-speech as her personal reading assistant, (and bar code and digital thermometer reader) and speech recognition as her phone navigation aid. Karen is adamant that “people in my business world” think about incorporating assistive technology design into their products.
I just read a CNET News Blog, by Steve Tobak, on what he considers to be the Top 10 Technology Flops, where he has placed speech recognition in the middle of the pack, with the words “This has to be the biggest disappointment of all, especially for Star Trek fans. But here we are, still banging away on our keyboards. At least biometrics is starting to gain some traction.” My first thought was “obviously this guy hasn’t done his research”, and then maybe, “he just didn’t define the scope of where he thought speech recognition was supposed to do in 40 years.” I think I’m leaning towards the first.
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