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Location and Mobile Augmented Reality Are The 2009 Game-Changers. Will Voice Be Next?

Posted on 01. Dec, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci in Mobile, Trends

FourSquare, SimpleGeo, Layar, Junaio are the start-ups of 2009. Amen! This is good, this is beautiful, and this is the promise of mobile coming true.

But there is an area that is still under-rated and under-hyped, and that is as needed as geo-location and mobile augmented reality for mobile to come full circle. That area is Speech Recognition. 2010 could be the year when it eventually hits mainstream, the year when voice becomes the “next touch”.

Why would that be?

The foundations have all been laid out: advances in speech technologies, speech recognition APIs, faster networks, broadband, cloud computing, better devices with user-friendly interfaces, compelling applications.

Who could be the game changers? The fact of matter is that there is nothing more sci-fish than using voice as a command. Captain Kirk’s talking to his computer is the archetype of our dreams. But the reality is a steep wall of scepticism at best, bad perceptions most frequently, towards services that so far haven’t always proved themselves.

The winner won’t be necessarily the company with the best technology, but the one who can sell us back to our dreams…

-Apple

In June, Apple unveiled Voice Control, its new voice user interface. What it does is very simple: it allows users to make calls and control the iPod features on the iPhone 3GS by simply speaking. Voice Control can be used to

• make a call by saying the name or number,
• tell the iPod app to play a song, play a playlist, shuffle, activate Genius, or have it tell you what song is currently playing.

-Google

Google’s bet on voice as the killer app for mobiles is not even a question. Google has developed its own speech recognition system, originally deoployed for the GOOG-411 free directory. A shortlist of its most recent milestones include disruptive services as:

• Google Voice, with its voice-mails and text messages transcriptions.
• Google free  turn-by-turn voice navigation.
• Voice Search.

-Microsoft

In October, Microsoft announced a slew of new services based on speech recognition:

• A mobile version of Bing with voice-enabled search.
• Bing 411.
• The Samsung Intrepid from Sprint, the first Windows phone to use the voice user interface of TellMe, the start-up that Microsoft acquired in 2007 for over $800million dollars. Intrepid users can press the Tellme button on the phone and say what they want — whether that’s to call, text a friend, or search Bing.
• Ford Sync, an in-dash recognition and search system.
• Voice Mail Preview, a speech-to-text technology, which automatically sends a text preview of voice mail right to the user’s inbox.

Nuance Communications

Nuance Communications, a provider of various speech recognition and predictive text products, is the behemoth of the voice industry with an estimated $1billion in sales. Recently Nuance has purchased Jott, whose service translate spoken messages into text and emails, and can be integrated with various web services, such as a Salesforce. Just today, AT&T announced its partnership with Nuance to offer voice-mail transcriptions.

Vlingo

A Boston-area company, Vlingo began to gain traction in 2008, when Yahoo licensed its speech recognition technology to empower its oneSearch offering.

Vlingo also offers a mobile app for Iphones, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile phones. Once the app is installed, it becomes the Voice UI of your phone. All you have to do is press a button and start speaking. The voice clip is put through speech recognition software, running on a server, and converted to text. The results are sent back to the phone in a matter of seconds.

The Vlingo application can work with other applications such as maps, notes, email and it also lets users update their Facebook and Twitter with a simple voice clip.

Vlingo has also opened its platform to developers who want to add voice features to their apps.

-SimulScribe&Ditech

SimulScribe has been around for a while with its voicemail-to-text technology. But lately it has stepped up with an exclusive partnership with Ditech, worth $17 million dollars, and released a version of its technology aimed at enterprises, with its new ability to operate behind firewalls. PhoneTag, its voicemail-to-text solution, is capable of around 85% accuracy and offers a human-powered service which can get up to 97% accuracy.

Tags: Speech recognition