I’m way overdue for the Q2 update on what happened in the world of UC, per my Twelve Days of UC December blog (below). I took advantage of the slow months in the industry this summer, and took some vacation time. It figures that the morning I took off for my second trip was when the Siemens announcement hit, so I missed it, but I’m back and ready to blog. Next week’s SpeechTek conference should initiate busier times in contact centers, UC and speech and I’m looking forward to it.

Despite the disappearance of SpeechTek West from San Francisco in the last year, SpeechTek 2008 continues to march onwards in New York, and is still the biggest speech technology show of the year. This year even though they co-located with destinationCRM, speech-specific vendors make up nearly 60 of the just under 100 exhibitors listed.

As usual it was announcement time in speech technologies, with some announcing throughout the show this week, and some vendors starting earlier in August. Among the highlights so far are the following:

Before continuing on about news at SpeechTek, here is another word on Nuance, which has been a busy bee this month. Tuesday Nuance announced its intent to acquire SNAPin Software Inc., a developer of mobile device and self-service technology, for $180M. This was on the heels of their attempts last week to buy Zi, for $40M. Nuance went on an acquisition spree last year, acquiring seven companies, and even in a year that I’ve mentioned has been slow for acquisitions, has acquired two this year and attempted one.

I think outbound notifications, also known as automated messaging when delivered as a message without an interactive component, have been given a bad rap. To use some clichés, voice messaging is truly one of the neatest things since sliced bread, but I would be rich if I had a nickel (or dime due to inflation) for every time I heard some twit talk about “voicemail jail”. Similarly, text-to-speech technology is so good nowadays that we have it in numerous languages, with different accents and even personalities, yet, I still hear someone occasionally label TTS as sounding like a drunken Swede (ok, no Swedes were intentionally insulted during the making of this blog). People knock speech recognition and IVR too, hence the GetHuman.com site, but now we turn our attention to another perception victim, automated outbound calling. This application of technology has been given a bad rap because it has been dragged down by being associated with bad telemarketing, calls – something people love to hate.