Speech technologies were seemingly alive and well at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, although I was not. Standing by my sad, but seemingly repetitive tradition of not attending CES, although I’ve always wanted to, I could only stand by and read what happened there. Happily though, it seems that speech technologies made more, but minor waves in the consumer end of things with both speech recognition and text-to-speech being employed in a numerous areas, including in automotive navigation and in-vehicle entertainment systems, personal navigation systems (PNDs), gaming consoles, and desktop applications. In fact, the “big man on campus” speech tech vendor, Nuance, claims to have had their technology inside over 100 products at CES.

Since reduction of power consumption was one of my 12 Days of UC wishes in December, when my colleague Samantha Kane-Mackay started an Earth Hour 2008 group on Facebook, I personally glommed onto it. It sounds like a simple thing; turn off your lights for an hour. Sydney, Australia did it last year. On March 31st 2007 they turned off the lights in the city with the result of reducing their power by 10.2%, which is the equivalent of getting 48K cars off of the road for that hour. Started by the Australian branch of World Wildlife Fund, this year the effort is going global. As of this writing they had dozens of cities signed up, 376 companies, and thousands of individuals. March 29th, 2008 is the day, at 8 pm in your time zone. Go check out Earth Hour 2008 and sign up yourself and your company.

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.

Yesterday Siemens Enterprise Communications announced OpenScale, their new global brand name for managed and professional enterprise communication services. At the same time they stated that they would be investing heavily in strengthening their existing global service infrastructure, and capabilities for delivering software-based unified communications services. I found the announcement interesting from a couple of perspectives. The first is that because of Siemens size relative to some companies that have in the past few years started to provide managed services, it gives much more weight to the emphasis in providing managed services across all application areas. It also puts Siemens squarely in the same camp with the big boys, IBM, Avaya, Cisco and BT, who all provide global managed services offerings, and are delivering UC.