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.

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: