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.
This week’s multi-pronged speech technology announcement by Microsoft is just one of a number of interesting speech announcements in the past month on the adoption of speech to improve customer and consumer experience. In the announcement press release, I liked what Zig Serafin, GM of the Speech at Microsoft Group said; “Speech is the new touch”, because it really is. We have known this for quite a while, but now there is an acceleration of the adoption of speech that is happening in mobility applications, desktop, and unified communications, that is quite appealing.
Last week I blogged about Mike McCue’s planned departure at the end of June from Tellme and Microsoft’s plans to fold Tellme and all other things speech into one division under Zig Serafin. This includes Tellme, a research team developing text-to-speech in Beijing, and the Redmond-based Speech Components group. I’ve since talked to Microsoft and a few others, so here is a brief update on the reorganization of speech at Microsoft.
I’ve followed AVST for almost 20 years, and if I can recall correctly, they were one of the first, if not the first of the “voice processing” (as we called it a decade ago) vendors to use speech recognition. At the time they first deployed it as a replacement for DTMF input for voice messaging and call control it was a pretty bold move because of the cost prohibitive nature of ASR. AVST, had systems from just a few ports to very large, so adding the cost of speech on top was pretty brave in my opinion.
For several years past I would have been gearing up to go to SpeechTek West, but that show expired the year before last. Thankfully we are approaching the second annual Voice Search Conference in San Diego, March 2-4, which should be even more interesting than last year as we have seen a prolific amount of announcements in the last 12 months on voice search, and the use of speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech recognition in unified communications, contact center and mobility applications.
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.
Before continuing on about news at SpeechTek, here is another word on Nuance, which has been a busy bee this month. Tuesday Nuance announced its intent to acquire SNAPin Software Inc., a developer of mobile device and self-service technology, for $180M. This was on the heels of their attempts last week to buy Zi, for $40M. Nuance went on an acquisition spree last year, acquiring seven companies, and even in a year that I’ve mentioned has been slow for acquisitions, has acquired two this year and attempted one.
There are dozens of conferences and trade shows every year tugging at the attention spans and calendars of customers, prospects, and analysts alike. Next week we have two great competing shows in the VoIP, telephony and unified communications space with VoiceCon in Orlando and VON in San Jose. In that case with topics, products and vendors being equally represented at both, my decision to attend was based on time and geography more than anything. Not so with the new Voice Search Conference that was held in San Diego this week as it was a must attend event for me. We have a lot of shows to choose from, but so few focused on speech technologies as the driver, even if those technologies are now being applied to contact centers, UC, mobility applications and other areas.
On the ninth day of UC the industry gave to me interface enhancing,
eight CFOs bilking,
overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.
It’s all about the user experience, and what is closer to the user than the application or device user interface. In UC one of the sexier technologies used in user interface design is speech recognition. As one of my primary research focal points I’m a big fan. In fact, I finally caved and bought a Blackberry Pearl this year just for voice-activated dialing (VAD) (I know. I’m a little slow on these things sometimes. It’s like the shoemaker not having any shoes). So, when one of the vendors that I talked to about unified communications wishes, wished for better speech recognition as an interface in mobile devices I jumped on it. Therefore, wish number nine is that ASR and UC vendors continue to overcome reliability issues for ASR used in unified communications applications, make them even simpler, and find even more useful ways to incorporate both ASR and TTS into UC application design.
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