As my dad drove us to the airport for our trip to Orlando, I got the bright idea to see how many times in one week I would encounter speech technologies while on vacation. This occurred to me as my some what technophobe father let on that he likes the navigation system in his new car). Frankly, I was intrigued. He doesn’t mind listening to TTS?

On a previous trip to Phoenix, I had a similar idea when I stood there captive in the baggage area, waiting for my bag and listening to multiple repetitive warning messages spoken using TTS. I never did follow up to find out why they use TTS, but I had an inkling that maybe the airport uses it because it’s just different enough from the real thing that people will stop and listen to it. Some day I’ll ask.

Back to Orlando. My sum total of experiences with ASR or TTS in one week – one. I was surprised. We went to four amusement parks and multiple other locations and not once did I encounter speech technologies. Perhaps Disney doesn’t believe in speech.

The one notable exception was the TeleNav navigation application on my husband’s Blackberry, which came in handy numerous times. He had tried out TeleNav, which you can trial for free for a month, and then $9.99 after, and had questioned whether it was worth it compared to Google Maps, which he also uses on his phone. In his opinion, Google Maps provides superior search capabilities, but it gives the user only text directions or visual maps, which can be a real liability if you are driving. With the TeleNav application, we ended up with text, maps, and clear directions spoken in a clear voice. It is definitely worth checking out.

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.

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 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.

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.