It’s the dog days of summer in telecom. Just what are the dog days? According to Wikipedia “The phrase Dog Days or "the dog days of summer", refers to the hottest, most sultry days of summer. They are a phenomenon of the northern hemisphere that usually falls between July and early September but the actual dates vary greatly from region to region, depending on latitude and climate. Dog Days can also define a time period or event that is very hot or stagnant.” It’s no only hot in here, since I dropped the kids off at camp and came home to my closed up house and an air conditioner that wasn’t working – and tomorrow is when the heat wave is supposed to start, it’s also that stagnant time of year in telecom.

So summer is not completely as boring as I wrote in my Dog Days of Summer post this week. There is activity in the speech technologies bullpen.

Late last month, newcomer, Vlingo, announced a new product, Vlingo for Blackberry, which will allow users to create and send e-mails and text-messages, search the Web, work with mobile applications such as dialing their phones, look up contacts or work with their calendars - all using unconstrained speech. This speech applications works on all Blackberry devices, which I was happy about as I have a Blackberry Pearl and applications such as FaceBook, are sorely lacking in functionality on the smaller Pearl keyboard. I’m going to try out Vlingo for Blackberry. Hey, if I’m lucky they will have voice-enabled FaceBook so I can carry my social network addiction on the road. Something like Vlingo would be spot on perfect for the Blackberry Pearl, as it has a small keyboard that has dual letters for each key. FaceBook for Blackberry has a password screen that doesn’t show you the letter that you have typed in the password fields, for security reasons. The problem with this is that with the error correcting mode for typing on the Blackberry, if you can’t see your password, you have no idea what letter Blackberry has put into the password field as it tries to guess at the correct spelling of a word. It’s impossible to log on.

I woke up to a press release on Convergys acquiring Intervoice. I have to say that I’m always somewhat surprised about these things, but not really, and when I look back on Intervoice for the past year the timing made great sense. There had been rumors of a small shedding of people over the last few months, but a lot of companies are doing that. That wasn’t a huge clue. The biggest change, that would make them an attractive acquisition target, but not a predictor of being acquired, was that they finally completed the roadmap they had set out do when they acquired Edify. That is, they finished merging the two product lines into a single software-only platform of solutions.

As I sat down to write this morning it occurred to me that I’ve been blogging for a year now. Wow. Two years ago the idea of having my own web site was non existent and so was the idea of blogging. I didn’t launch my own site until I was ready to start blogging and keep at it. Because I like to write, I took to it like that proverbial fish in water, blogging not only here, but on No Jitter and UC-Strategies.com as well. I can’t say it’s always easy as I have to slot it in with everything else, but I still like it.