Cisco’s TelePresence was worth the wait. Last week I finally had a chance to participate in a TelePresence meeting, with David Hsieh, Cisco’s Senior Director of Marketing for Emerging Technologies, after missing the opportunity to see it demonstrated last December at Cisco’s annual analyst conference. Although much has been written about the upfront costs of deploying TelePresence, when I experienced it in person, heard first hand about productivity gains across Cisco, reduced travel costs, slashed carbon footprint, and business transformation for customers, cost just didn’t seem that important.

As my dad drove us to the airport for our trip to Orlando, I got the bright idea to see how many times in one week I would encounter speech technologies while on vacation. This occurred to me as my some what technophobe father let on that he likes the navigation system in his new car). Frankly, I was intrigued. He doesn’t mind listening to TTS?

On a previous trip to Phoenix, I had a similar idea when I stood there captive in the baggage area, waiting for my bag and listening to multiple repetitive warning messages spoken using TTS. I never did follow up to find out why they use TTS, but I had an inkling that maybe the airport uses it because it’s just different enough from the real thing that people will stop and listen to it. Some day I’ll ask.

Back to Orlando. My sum total of experiences with ASR or TTS in one week – one. I was surprised. We went to four amusement parks and multiple other locations and not once did I encounter speech technologies. Perhaps Disney doesn’t believe in speech.

The one notable exception was the TeleNav navigation application on my husband’s Blackberry, which came in handy numerous times. He had tried out TeleNav, which you can trial for free for a month, and then $9.99 after, and had questioned whether it was worth it compared to Google Maps, which he also uses on his phone. In his opinion, Google Maps provides superior search capabilities, but it gives the user only text directions or visual maps, which can be a real liability if you are driving. With the TeleNav application, we ended up with text, maps, and clear directions spoken in a clear voice. It is definitely worth checking out.