Yesterday I had a talk with Tellme about what they have been up to nine months or so after being acquired by Microsoft. I’d followed them since their birth back in the late 90’s during the original “voice portal” craze, when companies like Tellme, BeVocal and HeyAnita! all came into being, touting web surfing using your voice. At the time all the analysts were crazed about surfing the web using your voice. That died down for awhile, and companies such as Tellme changed their business models to incorporate application development for self service applications and the like, creating large developer networks, tools, and networks for hosting applications.
Funny, but what is old is new again as voice search is hot. I was reminded of this when I got the press release today for the Voice Search conference being held in San Diego, March 10-12th, which I’m going to attend so I can immerse myself in what is happening in that area.
But let’s get back to Tellme for a minute. I hadn’t talked to them in over a year, but they have been doing a lot. They still have tons of speech-driven apps out there through people and partners in their developer network and through business consulting, both on the business solutions side and consumer. They have some big customers including UPS, Dominos and American Airlines on the business side and AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and Microsoft’s new 800-CALL-411 on the consumer side for mobile search and 411 directory assistance. They have a huge platform that answers 2 billion calls a year, set up so that companies can employ it, scaling up as much as their applications demand and paying only for the capacity they use, which is as it should be.
None of this is particularly surprising if you have been following Tellme at all. What wasn’t surprising, but was nice to get a sense of was that Tellme has survived and thrived, even as a subsidiary of Microsoft. For the most part they have been left intact. So what does this buy Microsoft? Well, one of the things that came out in our discussion was a comment about Tellme acting as a center of excellence for Microsoft’s speech products. Tellme offers multiple speech recognition engines for customers to use depending upon their needs, including Microsoft, Nuance and IBM. But it occurred to me that with the vast volume of calls that Tellme fields of people doing directory search that Tellme can act as the training ground for speech recognition tuning, much along the lines of what some people have mentioned that GOOG-411 does for Google’s speech recognition development. Now that is good for Microsoft’s speech as a whole and for furthering directory/mobile search too.
In a month after the Voice Search conference is over, I’ll report back on what everyone else is up to. I’m looking forward to it.