While the conference itself is new in name, the people behind it certainly are not. Voice Search was launched by the Applied Voice Input and Output Society (AVIOS) and Bill Meisel, President of TMA Associates and Editor of Speech Strategy News. Both TMA Associates and AVIOS have lengthy histories in the speech industry and both have in the past held separate speech shows; AVIOS most recently as part of SpeechTek, which is of the few true speech technologies shows in the industry. Thus, the AVIOS board and Voice Search program committee read like a Who’s Who in Speech Technologies – hence the allure. For attendees to have the brain trust of speech in one place is a pretty appealing proposition.

As for the name ‘Voice Search’, according to the conference founders, the principle behind voice search is to reduce the complexity and number of steps that a user must take to achieve an objective. This principle opened up the conference proceedings to a much broader audience than just those companies and subjects that might come to mind if you think about what searching using your voice can do, such as getting driving directions, voice-activated dialing (VAD) directory search, etc. So, naturally, there was heavy component of the program that dealt with subjects on searching with your voice, including talks on directory assistance, how to deal with unstructured searches, etc., which was to be expected. Related topics included speech-enabled mobility applications from VAD to ad-based directory search. However, the conference also included every speech related adjunct to these topics as well, such as speech-enabling CRM for contact center agents, speech analytics, and converting voicemail-to-text.

So what then is voice search, really? As David Namahoo of IBM pointed out when I met with him at the show, its neither a technical or a marketing term, much like we have with terms such as VoIP which is both technology and a marketing banner. Instead, David feels that voice search is the use of voice for mobility applications or for extracting data from databases or other data sources. He also feels that voice search is a rebirth of multimodal, but with more of an emphasis on giving the user more control, or making them feel psychologically like they have more control over how the application proceeds. He also said that because searching for data or information with your voice is easier and more natural than some of the more constrained dialog applications we have had in the past that it has the capacity to bring speech technology use to the masses, in that even those people who normally would never use a PC will still pick up the phone and use an application such as voice dialing or 511 services.
Whereas for the most part I agreed with David, I’m not sure about claiming that voice search is the rebirth of multimedia, as I’m still not convinced multimedia has gotten enough traction to have died and needed to be reborn, but I understand what he is getting at.

So why does this matter? It matters because voice search, or whatever term we use, is a necessary rallying cry for the speech industry to come together again at what I consider to be a critical and opportunistic time. Right now we have the convergence of a number of pretty hot marketing and technical areas, such as unified communications, VoIP, mobility, and contact centers, all with a focus on the end user experience. What better technology than speech is there to make that user experience better and more valuable? It is time to ride the wave of rapid customer acceptance and a growing tech-savvy population, and continue to drive the use speech technologies throughout these areas even further. This is the real theme I got from the conference. Let’s use speech to do such things as improve the end user experience, the productivity of the contact center agent, and use speech to provide more effective, better and safer mobility applications, for example. From this standpoint I can’t think of a better time for this conference to be launched and I hope it is even bigger and better next year.