Today the App Store in Apple’s iTunes site begins distributing Siri, a new app that transforms the iPhone into a “virtual personal assistant.” I know, we’ve heard the term before, describing precursor services like Wildfire, HeyAnita or the product of General Magic. Yet, in all those cases, the principal roles of the Virtual Assistant was to handle scheduling, messaging and simple directory-based activities (call origination, incoming call handling and the like).

Siri is set apart because it applies the depth of knowledge its founders and software specialists have built at SRI and elsewhere in creating a “cognitive assistant that learns and organizes” (CALO). Siri users benefit from a voluminous amount of pre-preprocessing and organization of information that has been carried out “in the cloud” on their behalf.

The image above illustrates Siri’s landing page. The illustrated topic areas serve as reminders of the sort of often-asked-for information which the service is tuned to handle. It also suggests phrases that users might try to get the information they want. Note that the suggestion below “Movies” is “PG-13 movies this afternoon”, illustrating that the “artificial intelligence” ingrained in the service is quite capable of knowing a movies rating and the meaning of “this afternoon” as well as the physical location of the originating user. And, given the precepts of CALO, responses get more accurate and useful as the system acquires more usage history.

I’ve had the service for a couple of days and here are my initial reactions. My overall experience has been quite positive. The quality of voice recognition (powered by the same “engine” that supports Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search on the iPhone) is quite good. It has been accurate both indoors and out. More importantly, the results are illustrated in a large white box for editing before submision. This form of spoken “utterance triage” is a must for speech enabled applications and will ultimately give users a chance to correct punctuation and capitalization, in addition to spelling.

Response time could feel a bit draggy (the general public hates latencies); but, on the positive side, the answers were qualitatively different from those of a general search engine (like the voice-activated Google app for the iPhone). Put simply, the service is more “domain aware.” It recognizes the differences in intent when a query is about a Taxi versus a movie and responds accordingly. The request for a “taxi service” is a great example. Google serves up links to various local taxi cab services in the area, including the phone numbers and a means to get directions.

Siri, by contrast, assumes that you want a taxi immediately and serves up a form, using Taxi Magic (powered by RideCharge), to book a ride, based on your location and a specified time. Before delivering the form, however, Siri serves up a number of comic book like dialog balloons with statements in plain English to tell you how it is processing your request. For example it might say “I found these taxis within walking distance” or suggest another way to interpret your utterance: “Get me a cab”, for instance.

In each of the chosen categories, the search engine is designed to accelerate the process of search and decisionmaking that culminates in a purchas or transaction. The company’s financial success will be predicated on supporting multiple transactions and taking a percentage fof the revenue generated. That’s another big difference between Google Voice Search and Siri.

Based on my experience, I encourage people to download and gain experience with Siri, just as it gains experience with you.

“Multi-Channel Customer Care: A Survey of Consumer Preferences”

Thursday, February 18th, 1 p.m. EST / 10 a.m. PST
Free Webcast – Sign-up Below!

In both preference and practice, people have established personal preferences in how they interact with selected vendors. A recent Opus Research survey shows the increasing sophistication in how consumers choose shopping and support options based on these preferences.

Among the survey highlights, it is clear consumers first identify products or services to purchase online. Subsequently, consumers apply all means of communication — including search, toll-free numbers, social networks, and mobile interactions — to pursue and support these transactions.

While phone-based customer support remains an important link in customer conversations, the survey provides empirical evidence that merchants and their technology providers need to extend support to all communications channels — including those with which their customers are growing most comfortable.

In this free webcast, Dan Miller, senior analyst with Opus Research, and Dan York with Voxeo, discuss the survey results and how emerging modalities (chat, IM, SMS, video) are influencing merchants in developing customer care solutions.

Speakers:
Dan Miller – Senior Analyst, Opus Research
Dan York – Director of Conversations, Voxeo

There is no question that “unified communications” and “collaboration” are destined to have a mobile component. By the light of a Telepresence system in Cisco’s offices in San Francisco, Laurent Philonenko, VP and general manager of Cisco’s Unified Communications Business Unit was joined by Pat Scheckel, VP of Converged Infrastructure Solutions at CDW, to provide insights into, first, the current and future offering of Mobile UC products from Cisco and, second, to inform us of the level of marketplace acceptance from the point of view of a major reseller/integrator/distributor/user of Cisco UC software and services.

For background, CDW’s Scheckel explained that his company, with 6,500 employees in 23 locations, had already been instrumental in 3,500 UC deployments (primarily in the U.S., but also “around the world”. Admittedly, not all of those implementations can be considered “mobile UC”, yet it is clear that virtually all of CDW’s customers and prospects are coming to grips with the reality that their employees are using their mobile phones to carry out their daily business.

In the past, Scheckel observed that IT decisionmakers may have put off the pursuit of a “fixed to mobile” solution as they tackled larger, transformative events such as mergers, PBX elimination, contact center consolidation or general “virtualization” of both IT and customer care resources. Today, things are different. At a minimum, employees are accessing email on their mobile devices. Many have had their eyes open to the potential of a “smartphone” to run multiple applications linked to the company’s CRM system, “presence” indicators or conferencing. The IT department or other keepers of the keys to business policy and procedures are looking for an easy way to embrace new, mobile platforms.

For its part, Laurent Philonenko says the company has been offering an iPhone application for free through the iTunes AppStore for almost a year. If it is there, it is not easy to find. A search for iPhone apps from Cisco Systems yielded two hits, but one is an “internet speed tester” utility and the other is a videogame called Cisco Edge Quest 2. That said, I had seen demos of the existing Cisco UC Mobility application (which is the client-side instantiation of applications which require enterprises to own and operate a Cisco Unified Mobility Advantage Server) and can attest to its core value, which is providing the IT department (and keepers of business rules and processses) with a secure, proven mechanism for extending advanced call routing, presence management, visual voice mai and directory features to mobile phones.

The new version will add Voice over WiFi, a feature called “shake-to-lock” which enables iPhone users to lock their phones with a simple shaking gesture, and another feature called “call preservation” which ensures that a user doesn’t drop a call when “going outside the application” to search a directory or check a calendar item. Voice dialing is also on the product roadmap (though it is not expected to be in the version released in April.

While the iPhone is the showcase for the new features, Cisco will have more mobile applications for the RIM Blackberry and Nokia E-series phones. Android will also be supported (although they have not seen a lot of Androids in enterprise IT fabrics), with qualified support of Microsoft Phone (Windows Mobile), should it re-establish itself as a contender. The iPhone is supported with a downloadable app that uses Java to render the keyboard and carry out instructions. We an also anticipate support of browser-based rendering of phone apps using HTML5 (much like the recently introduced Google Voice offering). This dual approach would extend Cisco’s reach across the entire community of smartphones running standard browsers.

In effect, Cisco and its master distributors like CDW are removing many barriers to enterprise acceptance of mobile phones. So called “Fixed to Mobile” transitions are less about purchasing new servers and hardware access points and more about downloadable software or browser-based communications. The market is certainly ready. Lower CapEx and reduced complexity make this a very timely offer.

Leave it to Google to launch an online resource for its third-party application providers that is clean, easy-to-use and informative. In an article in the Wall Street Journal (Jan 31), Jessica Vascallaro and Nick Wingfield characterized enhancements to the Google Solutions Marketplace simply as an effort to enlist software developers “in its battle with Microsoft.” Company spokespeople said they had no imminent announcements at this time, but my own perusal of the resources on the site revealed significant progress in packaging and presenting solutions and use cases that integrate Google Apps with the cloud-based resources of SaaS and enterprise software luminaries like Salesforce.com, IBM Websphere, Microsoft Exchange and many others, as illustrated in this Solutions Marketplace Success Stories Blog.

By positioning the site as an effort to “beat Microsoft” the press and analysts cast the search giant Google in an underdog role. Google claims to have about two million businesses using either free or paid versions of Google Apps (I would be inthe “free” category). By comparison, the WSJ reporters observe that there are “around 500 million users of Microsoft Office”, according to the Microsoft spokespeople. That means there’s a long way to go to reach parity.

Yet, as Google adds more store-like qualities to the Solutions Marketplace, the site will take on the “recombinant qualities” of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, which actively enlists third-party developers to build solutions that incorporate their software with resources in the SalesCloud or ServiceCloud. It is also expected to take on some of the qualities of the AppStore in Apple’s iTunes site, featuring product reviews, success stories and perhaps mechanisms to support user ratings.

Today, in classic Google style, the site features a lot of white space and blue links to landing pages which, in many cases, are blogs running on the original Blogger resource (Blogger’s parent, Pyra Labs, was acquired by Google in 2003). I’m not sure how the idea that Google is launching a “store” for business apps became “news”. Clearly it’s already up and running in the Solutions Marketplace. For instance, if you search the marketplace for “telephony” products you already find four products/services ranging from a unified directory utility to tools for building mashups based on the Android mobile operating system or Asterisk “open source” PBX.

Nonetheless, the news story was good stimulus to revisit the Google Web site to see how far The Sultan of Search has come in enlisting third-party software to augment its own cloud-based offering.

Last week, Genesys hosted an informative, entertaining and just plain comfortable gathering for industry analysts at the Rosewood Sand Hill Resort in Menlo Park. They provided us, the self-styled pundits, with access to such an effective mix of product planners, salespeople and customers who are putting their technologies into practice. The culmination was a presentation by Bill Boga, the principle enterprise contact center strategist at Kaplan, Inc., the $2.3 billion education subsidiary of The Washington Post Co.

One customer like Kaplan is all it takes to showcase Genesys’ broad line of software. Deployments span the “core” call routing resource, SIP server, voice processing (Genesys Voice Platform), task distribution (called intelligent Work Distribution, based on the Conseros acquisition) and multiple flavors of knowledge management and analytics. The entire fabric of software “resides behind”, “augments” or simply “extends the life of an installed base of Avaya or Nortel ACDs or PBXs.

That said, from my point of view, the main issue that both Genesys and Alcatel-Lucent addressed at the Analyst Relations meeting (which had the Twitter hashtag #genesysAR) was how the combined company plans to support efforts by third-parties that expect to benefit from development, marketing, sales and channel development by both Genesys and Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise Software Group (ESG). Merging the two organizations has been a complex process, under the auspices of ALU Executive VP of Enterprise Products Tom Burns in conjunction en Paul Segre (serving simultaneously as CEO of Genesys and president of Alcatel-Lucent’s Applications Software Group (ASG).

But the other B-I-G deal for ALU revolves around efforts to build a community of partners and application developers to leverage its considerable repertoire of platforms, tools and other resources that promote enhanced network services. As this link demonstrates ALU has invested a considerable amount of money and energy into promoting the emerging architectural and business models that leverage ALU’s intellectual property into “open” environments and APIs. And it tried to drive its point home with this video, which describes how Alcatel intends to support service providers’ (that means telco’s) efforts to support open business models and multivendor environments. The effort has already enlisted participation by tens of thousands of developers and integration partners.

Meanwhile, on the enterprise side, the combined Genesys/Alcatel-Lucent entity need a name for its enterprise-oriented developer network. In the coming months, we expect Alcatel-Lucent, and Genesys, to extend their efforts to support third-party developers and integrators. At the highest levels, it involves HP, Accenture, IBM and the like, but Genesys (with ALU) has an opportunity to expand into the middle markets in order to grow.

Genesys and ALU execs noted that their near term rivals are Avaya and Cisco, with Oracle looming in the future along with global rivals like Huawei. If they are going to compete, they must highlight their efforts to support Recombinant Communications and an active and involved developer community.

Take heart Skype, Fring, Truphone and all other IP-Telephony service providers. Apple (and I assume AT&T) have finally approved a VoIP-over-3G application for the iPhone, iPod Touch and, yes, the iPad. According to an article by Joseph Palenchar in TWICE (This Week in Consumer Electronics), the new application is the result of “a revision made by Apple its licensing agreements with applications developers” to correspond with a modification in the Apple iPhone’s SDK that enables VoIP phone calls over the cellular network.

It was a move that, among other objectives, aimed to please FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who is also quoted in TWICE, commending “Apple’s decision to open its platform to 3G calling, an action that will create new opportunities for entrepreneurs and provide more choices for consumers.” The immediate beneficiary is Connecticut-based iCall, which has added “free phone calls” from the iPhone to a roster of free or low-cost voice calls using PCs running specified versions of Windows, Linux or MacOS.

According to reports Fring has already joined iCall in the AppStore, while Skype says its app is ready but waiting for a few tests and modifications to be complete. The move dramatizes the opportunities presented by iPhone while, at the same time showcasing how opportunities can be created or destroyed at the whim of Apple’s policymakers. At this point, just a few days after Google launched its Web-based access to Google Voice features, there is no turning back, and charging forward means that new features and functions are bound to augment vanilla, free long-distance.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Application developers, on the other hand, stand ready to revel in it as the Apple tablet (whatever the trade name) is getting ready for its close-up. Call it what you will, but today it is a leterally a “Tabula Rasa”, a Latin term that often applies to a “fresh mind,” but could equally refer to any item or resource “existing in its pristine state” – i.e. the proverbial “Empty Slate”.

So what are people going to do with this yet-to-be revealed triumph in mobile computing and communications. A survey conducted among over 550 of the 19,000 developers registered with Appcelerator shows great expectations among the folks that will make the device truly useful. Ninety percent of the respondents said that they would have an app out for the Apple tablet within a year. Compared to alternatives, the device rates third behind the iPhone and Android, but ahead of (in order of “Highly Interested”) Blackberry, Palm Pre, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

When thinking of the category of app that respondents would develop, there is (thankfully) a marked shift away from “Games” to place “Busines/Productivity” at the top of the list of apps most likely to be developed. Entertainment ranked second, followed by Social Networking, Educations and (then) Games. Appcelerator compares these aspirational statements with the share represented by iPhone downloads where Games rank first, followed by Entertainment, Books, Education and Travel.

The enthusiasm of the developer cohort reflects the depth of interest in the new device and its capabilities. The elevation of Business/Productivity and Social Networking as major application areas reflects anticipated breadth in the services to be offered. Neither guarantees success for the tablet computer, which is a type of device that has languished since the introduction of the Dynabook by Alan Kay back in 1972. It was a good (and visionary) idea then. It is a great (and totally doable) concept now.

What’s different. Components are less expensive. Communications bandwidth is faster and more readily available (although Apple’s networking strategy has yet to be revealed). The general public’s understanding and acceptance of the touchscreen (with our without multi-touch) is not in question. There is a surfeit of digitized content, applications and capabilities. The developer community stands ready to deliver new applications. The iTunes platform stands ready to distribute and bill for new apps, upgrades and updates. Most importantly, customers on campuses, inside business enterprises and hanging around at home are waiting breathlessly for the next shiny thing from Apple.

This is not going to be John Sculley taking the stage, wielding an unimpressive handheld and saying “The Newton is Here!”, as a few hundred were airdropped onto the desktops of business leaders (who had no clue what they were and what they might be good for). Steve Jobs will be showing off one or more members of a family of devices that the impatient world has been waiting for. And believe me, if Google is able to deliver VoIP over the Web through the locked down iPhone distribution system so that people-in-the-know can read their voice mail, any number of solutions providers are looking forward to getting their goods ‘on the glass’ of Apple’s happy, shiny new object.

Get ready to witness Recombinant Communications at its best as Apple’s ‘empty slate’ captures the imagination of developers and end-users alike. They will then take turns defining and assembling new solutions that transform each blank screen into personal portals into better searching, shopping, traveling, gaming and otherwise entertaining themselves.

TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld reported that Google is about to launch a mobile Web site that extends the capabilities of Google Voice to the Apple iPhone and Palm Pre/Pixi. While he calls it an “end run” around Apple’s governance of the application distribution process, it is more accurately an instantiation of Google’s core philosophy that apps (including mobile) should be executed “in the cloud” not on end-user devices. It means judicious use of Web “standards” (especially HTML5) to make a user’s experience identical, whether he or she is on a desktop, laptop or smartphone.

As reported by Schonfeld, there are some neat call handling tricks going on behind the scenes to enable a mobile app to initiate a call through the browser. But the end users will find a familiar “inbox” complete with SMS, transcribed voice messages (such as they are) and call records for phone calls received or originated using their assigned Google Voice number.

“Cord-cutting” is a major trend underlying Recombinant Communications. Google is joined by Ribbit Mobile, Truphone, fring and even the mother of all VoIP providers Skype are evolving and extending their range and product depth over smartphones. In making the move, each is demonstrating how far we have moved beyond inexpensive international calling and single number service.

This quote in an article by Network World’s John Fontana says it all:

“I think customers are very content,” says Bruce Elgort, president of Elguji Software. “What they did not see [at Lotusphere] is yet another set of versions, another set of features. They saw continuity, they saw that Vulcan is the Lotus vision for consuming services, something that is more standards-based and they saw software like Connections that is ready for the enterprise.”

Elgort was talking about an initiative called “Project Vulcan”, which was unveiled at last week’s Lotusphere 2010. It also marked the triumphant return of Alistair Rennie, as the new General Manager of the Lotus business unit (replacing Bob Picciano, who will become head of sales for all of IBM Software). Rennie will work closely with another former GM of Lotus, Mike Rhodin, who is taking charge of a newly formed “solutions” group within IBM Software. Its counterpart under the new organization is a “middleware” group, headed by Robert LeBlanc (who had been in charge of worldwide software sales and marketing).

Both Rhodin and Rennie are both well-versed in and committed to solutions that are built around open APIs and RESTful programming models. As Rennie explains in the Network World article, “Vulcan becomes the framework for integration of collaboration and business services with refinement and context delivered through social analytics.” In other words, IBM expects end-users to build their own solutions through HTML5-based browsers in ways that mimic their experience with their favorite social networking tools.

IBM’s Lotus-branded software has long had hooks into the social realm with products like Connections (a variant of Lotus Notes/Domino), Sametime and Quickr. At Lotusphere demos showcased how the combination also supports mobile/social communications, using client software that runs on RIM Blackberries.

A few years ago, when he was GM of Lotus, Mike Rhodin told me that the most interesting developments wold always combine two-or-more of the packaged solutions and that higher productivity and value are always “at the interstices” (at least I think that was the quote). These interstitial developments are at the heart of Recombinant Communications and the product announcements from Lotusphere, along with organizational changes highlight IBM’s presence (along with the likes of Cisco, Google, Microsoft and dozens of others) on Opus Research’s Recombinant Communications Leader Board.

Among IP-Telephony service providers, 8×8 Inc. was one of the most active newsmakers at the ITExpo in Miami. On Thursday it formally launched several enterprise services under the “Virtual Office” brand. The products include a Web-based dashboard for setting up and controlling user preferences for a virtual office; a “unified communications” suite of services called Virtual Office Pro; and the obligatory Mobile App, sold through iTunes and extending the Virtual Office phone number of features to iPhones and the iPod Touch.

Unified Communications, iPhone apps and dashboards for enterprise VoIP are slipping into the category of “commodity.” What caught the eye of the digirati was a Facebook app called 8×8 Connect, which was introduced on the second day of the ITExpo. Here’s where Om Malik invites readers of GigaOm to “Call Me via VoIP on Facebook. In the article, Om conducts a test drive of the new service (which can be accessed and launched here). Om notes that the service “could be especially helpful for small business owners and consultants, who could use it as a way to generate interest in the products/services they’re selling.”

Om also mentions that it could be improved by making it “more personal.” His example would be to allow users to upload their own picture, avatar or brand so that it can be displayed with the user’s phone number (I’d call this part of the movement toward better Caller ID). He also sees advantages to being able to embed the “Call Me” button on a company or individual’s “fan pages.”

My trial went a little differently. I followed the link from GigaOm to the “8×8 Connect” page on Facebook. Then things started to go awry. Being the unintentional demo breaker that I am, I accidentally mis-typed my email address and (probably because my proper name is much more than “Om Malik”) my “8×8 Connect” record and registration form is associated with another Dan Miller, who had been there before me and entered a different mailing address and a bogus phone number. Needless to say, I lost confidence in going any further and removed the app from my Facebook account. After doing so, I went back into the app to see if I could “fix” my mistake, but the record of my evil twin seems to be persistent.

I applaud 8×8’s effort to add click-to-call to social networking and hope this registration “bug” is just that – a fixable bug. However, one of the major challenges faced by solutions providers in the era of Recombinant Communications is to continue to introduce a steady stream of innovative services, but they need to do a better job of testing such services. Alternatively, they could just “do a Google” by calling every new offering a “beta.”