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.
SpeechTEK 2009 was held this week at the Marriott Marquis in New York, in conjunction with CRM Evolution. As with every conference there tend to be themes that run through the show floor and presentations. SpeechTek 2009 was no different. Among the themes at this year’s show was the concept of speech-on-demand, otherwise known as hosted speech.
Things really picked up in unified communications in the third quarter as it was back to school for everyone. This is despite the fact that we didn’t have any big shows during the summer except for SpeechTek. Q4 should be even more interesting, however, as VoiceCon is coming up. Here is the made up song again, with a smattering of things that happened in some of the categories. Next time I blog a song, it will be a short one!
I had the pleasure of speaking with Brian Garr of IBM’s Application and Integration Middleware Software (AIM) group (WebSphere), this morning about IBM’s WebSphere Translation Server (WTS) 5.0, which was announced at Lotusphere last week. I have to say I’m impressed. If you are not familiar with it, WTS it is middleware that provides the capability of translating text from one language to another, and with this release they are up to nine languages, which include traditional and simplified Chinese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Korean. If you don’t ever have to translate from one language to another you probably wouldn’t care, but for the millions of people, just in this country alone, that don’t have English as their first language, being able to read documents, web sites, and myriad other kinds of text, without having to find a translator, is a godsend.
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