I was just reading Juliana Kenny’s article on TMCnet, entitled, ‘Horror Gets More Horrifying with IVR’, and I followed the link out to YouTube to see the movie trailer she talks about. Yikes! This has to be the most interesting use of speech recognition I’ve ever seen or heard of.

It is a trailer for a movie called ‘Last Call’ in which the viewers register their cellphone numbers to be randomly called as audience participants in a horror movie. Using speech recognition the application randomly calls a registered moviegoer, and they get to interact with, or direct, the actions of the protaganist in the horror movie. My words cannot do this justice, you need to go see the trailer for yourself.

Someone let me know where I can see one of these – in English though. If I had to use German, like in the trailer, I’d send that poor actor right to their death!

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.

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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.

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This week I participated in a webinar, along with Voxify, on the new VUI or Voice User Intelligence in customer support applications. You can listen to the replay here if you are interested. The main theme was the importance of creating a better user experience for customers within self-service and some of the advanced ways of improving self-service applications to achieve this. The folks at Voxify and I have talked for a long time about how they are improving applications in the hospitality sector with such customers as Red Lion Hotels, so from a over-the-phone customer support perspective, Voxify is using speech, and intelligence about the customer to give the customer better service when they call in.

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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.

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I ran across this blog , by Houston Neal of Software Advice.com, on seven great applications for IP-PBXs in the medical field, which is a good start to laying out what can be done in different vertical markets with IP, particularly in the medical field, which is ripe for transformation. Houston points out, that in his practice of advising companies of free software to help in business, that in the medical field he believes that there is a lot to be gained by integrating IP-PBXs with electronic health records (EHR) and practice management systems. I couldn’t agree more. He then lays out the seven great applications he feels would be the result of combining voice and data using open source technology.

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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.

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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.

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Microsoft announced that Tellme Networks Founder and GM, Mike McCue has decided to leave the company at the end of June. Tellme, who I frequently blog about for their speech recognition and self-service offerings (see previous blog on their Spring ’09 announcement) has been doing great things since they were acquired by Microsoft two years ago.

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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.

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