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.
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.
Back in 2007 when Tellme was acquired by Microsoft, one of the benefits of the acquisition that was barely mentioned was what a huge test bed of data Tellme would be able to provide to the Microsoft speech research groups to help them tune and improve their speech engine. Now we are seeing more of the fruits of this acquisition as Tellme adds the Microsoft Speech Server to its arsenal of speech products, with new features that improve its accuracy and increase its robustness against noise and variations in voice characteristics.
http://www.verint.comI just got back from the second annual Voice Search Conference in San Diego, organized by the non-profit Applied Voice Input Output Society (AVIOS) and Bill Meisel (president, TMA Associates, editor, Speech Strategy News). Last year I blogged on the initial show, and if you read the blog, the show had a lot of contact center content to it, but looking back on now, a lot of it was about applications in their infancy or being done in research, such as using speech recognition alongside contact center agents to collect data, do data dips and populate agent screens during the call to speed up the call, for example.
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.
Despite the disappearance of SpeechTek West from San Francisco in the last year, SpeechTek 2008 continues to march onwards in New York, and is still the biggest speech technology show of the year. This year even though they co-located with destinationCRM, speech-specific vendors make up nearly 60 of the just under 100 exhibitors listed.
As usual it was announcement time in speech technologies, with some announcing throughout the show this week, and some vendors starting earlier in August. Among the highlights so far are the following:
I’m way overdue for the Q2 update on what happened in the world of UC, per my Twelve Days of UC December blog (below). I took advantage of the slow months in the industry this summer, and took some vacation time. It figures that the morning I took off for my second trip was when the Siemens announcement hit, so I missed it, but I’m back and ready to blog. Next week’s SpeechTek conference should initiate busier times in contact centers, UC and speech and I’m looking forward to it.
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