Regrettably, SpeechTek and VoiceCon overlap 100% on the days they are being held this year. Since I cover the same areas that both these shows do, my decision to go to VoiceCon, instead of SpeechTek, is based entirely on the formula of “pay lots of money to fly to New York for four days, or sleep in my own bed and drive to San Francisco.” All I can say now, is “oh rats!”, as Syntellect put out a press release Tuesday about having a sneak peek at a new product they are introducing, that alleges to solve many of the issues I brought up in my testing blog last week.

Here is an update on a startup company in the UK that I’ve been following for a year now, and a few of you may know about. Well worth checking into, VoxIQ provides an enabling technology to the contact center market that combines speech technologies and knowledge databases to assist live agents in providing the best customer service and satisfaction possible - and they do it really fast. The key to VoxIQ’s uniqueness is in the combination of speech recognition and the use of knowledge databases. Many companies use speech recognition or speech analytics to improve agent performance, or knowledge-based systems (KBS) to assist agents, but VoxIQ uses them in tandem, to provide dynamic database information to the agent in real-time as the conversation progresses with the caller.

In case you aren’t familiar with Voxify, they are one of the pioneers in the use of speech-recognition-driven automated agents in contact centers. With customers like Hammacher Schlemmer in retail and Red Lion Hotels in hospitality, Voxify agents have really taken automation in the contact center to a different level. Since coming out with these speech-enabled agents Voxify has made regular updates to the product, so I was thinking that maybe their next move would be to add some sort of speech analytics or knowledge database-driven capability to their agents, but not this round. Instead, they surprised me by announcing two other things at SpeechTEK – allowing customers to deploy their solution on-premise, instead of or in addition to the hosted solution that they have been providing, and enabling contact center managers to change routing and scripting of self-service call flows dynamically.

Although I wasn’t able to attend SpeechTek last week in New York, I did talk to a number of people who were there, along some of the vendors who were exhibiting. Based on the show floor and announcements this month, the industry has made a lot of headway into automated customer support, mobile applications, and entrance into emerging markets, such as unified communications. Here is fraction of what I missed.

I checked in with LumenVox this morning, after missing them at SpeechTek last month. With all the press that Microsoft and Nuance get (not that I have anything against either), its still nice to know that other speech technology vendors are not only thriving, but really helping niches in the market.

Just a short update on VoxIQ. Seeing as my August 19th blog title was “VoxIQ Enhances Next Generation Speech Recognition in the Contact Center and Beyond”, I figured I would have to give an update and say that VoxIQ enhances itself this time. True. VoxIQ and Loquendo announced this week that VoxIQ is using Loquendo’s Automated Speech Recognizer (Loquendo ASR) through Loquendo’s VoxNauta VoiceXML and CCXML platform to facilitate improvement in real-time call flow between agents and customers.

Interactive Intelligence announced their 3.0 release for Customer Interaction Center (CIC) and Vonexus Enterprise Interaction Center (EIC) with lots of new functionality, including integration to Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging, and some features to simplify deployment. But the new security features and speech technology function were what caught my eye.

I spent much of last week in sunny Phoenix at Interactive Intelligence’s partner conference, which was quite a show. For a company of roughly 600 people, competing with the likes of the Cisco’s and Avaya’s of the world, they are doing all right. After 15 consecutive profitable quarters, cash flow is up, sales are way up, and they keep getting awards like Indianapolis’s sixth fastest growing company, placement among Indiana’s 50 great businesses, and just missed cracking the 200 mark among the top 500 Global Software and Services Suppliers – the company ranked 209th in this year’s Software 500, up 21 spots compared to last year.

I just read a CNET News Blog, by Steve Tobak, on what he considers to be the Top 10 Technology Flops, where he has placed speech recognition in the middle of the pack, with the words “This has to be the biggest disappointment of all, especially for Star Trek fans. But here we are, still banging away on our keyboards. At least biometrics is starting to gain some traction.” My first thought was “obviously this guy hasn’t done his research”, and then maybe, “he just didn’t define the scope of where he thought speech recognition was supposed to do in 40 years.” I think I’m leaning towards the first.

On the third day of UC the industry gave to me an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.

This wish is all about putting a microscopic lens or focus on the assistive technology (AT) side of “any time, any place, anywhere, through the device of choice”, or other catch phrases the industry has used over the years. I was inspired to add this as one of my wishes because of discussions with my blind friend, Karen Parsegian, who started to go blind about seven years ago, and had the lights go completely out on Christmas morning five years ago. Some Christmas present that was. Since then, she and I have had many discussions about what I am working on, with me (probably) boring her about unified communications and speech technologies. Now she is a veteran speech technology user herself, as a good proportion of her communications life revolves around having text-to-speech as her personal reading assistant, (and bar code and digital thermometer reader) and speech recognition as her phone navigation aid. Karen is adamant that “people in my business world” think about incorporating assistive technology design into their products.

On the ninth day of UC the industry gave to me interface enhancing,
eight CFOs bilking,
overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.

It’s all about the user experience, and what is closer to the user than the application or device user interface. In UC one of the sexier technologies used in user interface design is speech recognition. As one of my primary research focal points I’m a big fan. In fact, I finally caved and bought a Blackberry Pearl this year just for voice-activated dialing (VAD) (I know. I’m a little slow on these things sometimes. It’s like the shoemaker not having any shoes). So, when one of the vendors that I talked to about unified communications wishes, wished for better speech recognition as an interface in mobile devices I jumped on it. Therefore, wish number nine is that ASR and UC vendors continue to overcome reliability issues for ASR used in unified communications applications, make them even simpler, and find even more useful ways to incorporate both ASR and TTS into UC application design.

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.

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.

This morning I had the pleasure of speaking with Jon Catlin, Vice President of Product Development at Syntellect on their revolutionary VoiceXML testing tool, Voiyager. Voiyager does what Syntellect terms Dynamic Application Discovery, in essence, it completely tests every possible path of a VoiceXML application with remarkable speed; something that previously wasn’t possible in VoiceXML application development. I think it is very cool. You can hear Jon talk about what the product does and how effective it in this podcast. Just click on the podcast tab.

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.

I stumbled on a new one today. I just got a new credit card from Capitol One – you know the no hassle guarantee people. It had that sticker on the front that said that you had to call to activate your card, so I did. First off, I was greeted with that irritating “press 1 for English”, but that isn’t my main beef. It was that the next prompt, surprisingly asking me to say or enter my 16-digit account code. Yippee! Speech recognition. I could almost forgive them for making me press a button because I speak English. But wait. After giving them my 16-digit account code and being transferred to an agent queue; notice I didn’t say agent; the very first words out of the agent’s mouth, once I got one were “please give me your 16-digit account code”. This company is savvy enough to use speech recognition in their application (albeit for only one prompt),but they don’t even have basic CTI? Goodness gracious. What happened to their no hassle guarantee?

There are dozens of conferences and trade shows every year tugging at the attention spans and calendars of customers, prospects, and analysts alike. Next week we have two great competing shows in the VoIP, telephony and unified communications space with VoiceCon in Orlando and VON in San Jose. In that case with topics, products and vendors being equally represented at both, my decision to attend was based on time and geography more than anything. Not so with the new Voice Search Conference that was held in San Diego this week as it was a must attend event for me. We have a lot of shows to choose from, but so few focused on speech technologies as the driver, even if those technologies are now being applied to contact centers, UC, mobility applications and other areas.

Some of the most interesting presentations given at last week’s Voice Search conference in San Diego were focused on the contact center. These sessions honed in on four aspects of using speech in the contact center. The first, and most interesting to me, was using voice user interfaces (VUIs) and speech analytics to assist contact center agents to do their jobs more effectively, and also to improve automation of IVR front-ends to contact centers, to enhance the caller experience and agent portion of the call, if required. In this context voice search is really the convergence of speech recognition and analytics to provide contact center agents with information on their screens that they normally would have had to go type to search for.

This really is a story about audio conferencing and a meeting I had with Wyde Voice at the VON conference in San Jose yesterday. Unfortunately, its not about Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, although that is pretty much what I had for lunch at the show with back to back vendor meetings (bless those vendor candy bowls). In any case, there were a number of great technical tidbits that Wyde offered up about their new wideband audio conferencing technology, but the one that grabbed me the most, that I’ll talk about first, is that they will be offering voice verification as part of audio conferencing, and this is something I haven’t seen or heard about before. Being the speech girl that I am, I like it. It’s like combining peanut butter and chocolate.

At CTIA Wireless yesterday Yahoo Inc. announced a collaboration with speech start-up Vlingo in which Vlingo will provide the speech recognition to compliment Yahoo’s oneSearch search technology for mobile phone applications. Marco Boerries, EVP of Yahoo’s Connected life division; the one that focuses on mobile products, did a demo of the new Yahoo! oneSearch at CTIA, by asking the application where is the best play to play craps in Las Vegas.

We have speech-enabled solutions for the SMB market out there already. In fact, I will be writing about some of them in a Q1 update of my 12 days of UC blog, probably next week. But Active Voice, who have been in the voice/unified messaging market for more than a decade, has finally cracked the code on providing an affordable, single-digit IQ (SDIQ ) installation, speech-enabled auto-attendant for the SMB market. That would be the many people are starting to pay attention to, but still much underserved SMB market.

It’s been a quarter since I blogged my industry wish list for unified communications, so I figured I would revisit the list to see how we are doing. I don’t want to make this a beauty contest as there have been so many announcements, big and small, particularly as we had a number of voice shows last quarter, but here are some highlights. One caveat; just because we have had a lot of announcements this quarter doesn’t mean we have marked anything off of the list. It just means we have made progress in several categories. Here is a recap of my December “wish list” song, and the category each line represents:

I just caught up with Syntellect to see what has gone on since I last blogged about Voiyager, Syntellect’s incredible application testing technology. I’d seen a few press releases on recent successes, including one in April on a win of one of the largest dental insurance carriers (name withheld to further disappoint this analyst in her 12 days of UC wish for more referenceable accounts). Besides not revealing the customer name, the press release left out some of the jaw dropping results of the customer test. The main details of the press release were:

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.