Back in March, Orange Business marked the eighteenth month of its “Business Together with Microsoft” marketing program by offering a new instance of Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 R2 that integrates OCS into a managed offering built on Cisco IP-Telephony infrastructure. At the time, through the Business Together program, 450,000 enterprise end-users were already using Microsoft Communicator supplied by Orange.

The Business Together program brought Cisco more tightly into the mix of products and services positioning Communicator as a single point of entry for real-time, multi-modal communications including IM, email, and mobile telephony. The Cisco connection starts with Cisco branded IP-phones that facilitate both presence indicators and “click-to-call” call initiation among other employees or business partners with contact lists associated with Microsoft’s OCS, Outlook, Office suite or SharePoint software. I believe Microsoft’s Active Directory server must be involved as well.

Meanwhile, Aspect Software continues to chronicle advancements in OCS deployment both internally and externally. As part of the inside game Aspect continues to illustrate the adoption and use of OCS throughout its company on this site. [As a brief aside, it looks like "federated" IMing has a long way to go.] For outside consumption, Aspect announced general availability of a suite of software called UC for the Contact Center. This instance extends OCS-based IM into the contact center to facilitate functions like “Ask and Expert”. It also marks the marketing debut of Tellme (Microsoft’s IVR subsidiary) as the integrated speech application service provider (ASP) for “hybrid” voice self-service deployments.

Both approaches are designed to accelerate deployment of applications built on a decidedly Microsoft-flavored approach to Unified Communications. For Aspect, UC is a Microsoft-only proposition, with tight integration to Aspect’s suite of inbound and outbound customer care software suites and workforce management software. Orange Business has a number of other approaches, including an instance of Genesys Customer Interaction Management to support multivendor environments.

This article by David Gallagher in the NYTimes’ “Personal Technology” section is a taste of things to come as phone-based transcription goes mainstream. Using the voicemail transcription function form Google Voice, Gallagher has provided a very visible venue for people to do what they like to do best, “break the system.” We’ve seen this before, people reading Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky into a “natural language” speech recognizer, just to see what comes out the other end.

In his introduction, Gallagher acknowledges that Google calls the service “experimental” and explains that the purpose of the column is to see how far Google has “pushed the limits” of the technology in order to provide accurate renderings or voicemail. His conclusion, stated up front, is that his callers didn’t have to push the limits very far “before it broke.”

Google’s approach uses different values on a gray scale to illustrate the system’s level of confidence in its recognizer. Bolded characters show high levels of confidence, light gray indicates that the system is not so sure of the quality of its rendering. That fact is not captured in Gallagher’s column. All the same, I’m not sure what value the different gradations bring, except that it might establish a new convention for displaying results (perhaps including search results) according to an algorithm that illustrates the level of “trust” a recipient ought to place in them.

If there is good news to be found in the public exposure of automated transcription’s shortcomings, it is the role such columns play in establishing end-user expectation. Acceptance of voice transcription technology (or lack thereof) is following a well-established pattern. Although, it is not following a hype curve or crossing a chasm, the path is predictable, nonetheless. The first step involves trying to break the new technology. Once they’ve established their mastery, the next step is to figure out how to “game” the system, meaning that they will discover and define how to make the system work for them. In the long-run that’s how they make it their own, personalized service.

From a product marketing point of view, the mission is to manage end-user expectations. Let’s be honest. Speech recognition and transcription that is 100% accurate is a pipe dream. As a matter of fact, accuracy in understanding a spoken utterance is incalculable. Failure to recognize a single word in a voice mail (a proper name perhaps) can distort the meaning of the entire message. Statistically, what may be 99% correct rendering on a word-by-word basis but 100% failure at recognizing overall meaning.

The problems with accuracy are not the exclusive domain of Google Voice and its “fully-automated” approach. Other, human-assisted, services – from SpinVox, PhoneTag, Nuance and others – should play up the game-like aspects, rather than the accuracy of their services.

Most importantly, voicemail-to-text introduces a level of convenience for recipients. It enables them to read (in silence) the system’s “first pass” at deriving the meaning of an inbound message. They can save, forward, respond or perform any other function they might do on an email or text message, including editing. That’s a key concept and I certainly hope that service providers market the service based on the promise of convenience (and even entertainment value), rather than accuracy.

There’s an interesting endgame to the Dial Directions story, as the pioneering voice search company announced today that it has been acquired by Sakhr Software, a company that specializes in natural language processing in Arabic. The resulting company will have 200 employees. Dial Directions’ CEO Adeeb Shanaa will have the same title at Sakhr, while the cheif executive of Sakhr, Fahad Al Sharekh, is elevated to chairman of the combined company, with the objective of building more business alliances and partnerships.

One of the early fruits of the partnership is an application for the Apple iPhone and RIM Blackberry that performs real time translation between spoken English and Arabic. This YouTube video provides a demonstration. Mobile translation of this sort is something akin to the Holy Grail of natural language voice processing. Offering the function as a Smartphone app is a real coup. It benefits from nearly twenty years invested by Sakhr in building a knowledge base of Arabic phrases to support optical character recognition (OCR), machine translation (MT), data mining and search.

Sakhr’s long-standing expertise in the field attracted the attention of BBN Technologies, which incorporated the technology into its work on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) GALE Project (referring to “Global Autonomous Language Exploitation” efforts to capture and recognize huge amounts of spoken words and text in a variety of languages. IBM and SRI have been vying with BBN over the past few years to make breakthrough advances in “natural language understanding” across a multitude of languages, dialects and modalities.

The mobile application is not related to GALE, but it is an impressive demonstration of Sakhr’s underlying technology. It is the product of a partnership between Dial Directions and Sakhr that dates back to 2008 when the two companies formed a developmental partnership to address “language application technology for mobile, cloud-computing environments.” The result was a “first of its kind open speech-to-speech mobile translation application for the U.S. government and business customers.”

The video demonstration is, indeed, impressive. The challenges surrounding transcription (even in a single language) are formidable. As the company brings the application to the marketplace it will need to manage user expectations surrounding “accuracy” – which is a very tough nut to crack in the transcription world where mis-recognizing a single word can distort the meaning of an entire utterance. In the commercial marketplace, that is the proverbial, technological elephant in the room.

For a few years now, IVR specialists rode a wave of new deployments as local governments launched 311 numbers to provide access to non-emergency services. It was a defensive strategy by city governments to divert what are considered “nuisance calls” to the emergency 911 contact centers – which carry the colorful acronym of PSAP (Public Service Access Points). In rolling out 311 numbers, municipal governments discovered that citizens – in addition to the anticipated complaints/reports of potholes, blight, roadkill, noisy neighbors, etc. – sought access to information about general government services. 311 became the abbreviated numbering plan for e-government and a phone-based front-end to the local government’s knowledge base and IT departments.

As is so often true in the era of Recombinant Telephony, success leads to transformation and an acceleration of service definition technical specification. Taking New York City as an example, the “Open 311″ initiative started taking shape with this open letter to Hizonner Michael Bloomberg, in late May. Today, courtesy of Twitter, we learned of the first draft of a specification for the Open311 service. The collaborators will take over now and it will accelerate extension of government services beyond IVR and phones to include Web services through what the author calls:

an open API for sending service requests or identifying issues that have a specific geographical component. For example, reporting a storm drain that is clogged or a streetlight that is out. Imagine if your smart-phone, your local blog, and websites like SeeClickFix could talk back and forth with local governments automatically.

…and to think that it all started with a three-digit abbreviated dialing code: 311.

I’ve written a lot about Google Voice on this site. Today Greg Sterling took his turn on the Local Mobile Search site, here. Greg makes some very good points about the need for Google to do more than a series of “soft launches” for its cloud-based services like Google Voice or Google Checkout.

My belief is that Google introduces its Web services so softly because it can afford to do so. It can gauge the organic demand for selected, hosted Web services and let the market (or at least the geeky development community) decide which ones move to the next level. At the same time it is able to present instances of its productivity suite (Calendar, Docs, Gmail, and Tasks), information/publishing services (News, Reader, Book Reader, Maps, Goog411) and other useful/social services (YouTube, Translate, orkut) in ways that make all of its “properties” potentially more valuable as developers invent more ways to leverage these existing assets. That’s the essence of Recombinant Telephony.

Ultimately, over the next few years, all will be caught up in The Wave.

Verizon Business recently issued this press release to herald the launch of “Web Center Voice” as a “cloud based” IVR service. The service is quite in line with the general receptivity to Software as a Service, On Demand telephony and Web 2.

The announcement attracted little attention primarily because Verizon business chose to market the service as a slight repositioning of the five-year old IP Web Center. As they explain, “Unlike the original offering, which requires IP connectivity, customer contact agents using Web Center Voice can use a wired or mobile phone or Internet-connected PC to place and receive calls across the public switched telephone network or the Internet (voice over IP).”

This announcement stands in stark contrast to AT&T’s aggressive marketing of Hosted Integrated Contact Services which we describe here. In fact, the link that is embedded in the press release goes to a landing page in the Verizon Business Web site that describes a full-range of “contact center solutions” with nary a mention of Web Center Voice. Entering the term “Web Center Voice” in a search box on the page yielded an equally generic description of the IP Web Center offering.

Web Center Voice is an example of Recombinant Telephony, but it has gone slightly awry. Communities of telephone application developers our building speech front ends for Amazon EC2, Microsoft’s Azure, SalesForce.com, Voxeo and others. We had expected more sizzle from Verizon Business for what has the potential to be a very meaty steak.

“On-demand” services are a sign of the times as financial pressures lead companies to avoid capital expenses without compromising the quality of services offered customers or the quality of life for employees. Risk reduction is a big part of the decision process as well. Customer care support infrastructure has become fragile (some would say “brittle”) when trying to accommodate changes in delivery channels (from phone to Web to social media to mobile devices and any mixture that customers can conceive). That’s why it is a relief to migrate all or part of the operations to third-party service providers with pay-as-you-go or on-demand options for customer self-service elements like interactive voice response (IVR), e-commerce Web sites, outbound notifications, live agent call-handling and “all-of-the-above.”

Enter Empirix, whose “Hammer” technology helped define the business of quality assurance testing in contact centers (since 1992) and more recently for IP-based network services and networking components. Today, Empirix is formally launching Emprix Testing as a Service(TM), in response to a growing need from companies who are making major investments in a wide range of self-service resources and require highly customized (and dynamic) quality assurance testing that won’t add to the capital budget.

The “Testing as a Service” approach enables Empirix to scale the service quickly and almost indefinitely and to do so at predictable levels of operating expense. While this is the formal “launch,” the efficacy of the approach has been borne out by live implementations at a large mail-order clothing merchandiser and a major North American utility. In the first case, the company was making a major investment in new IP-based infrastructure to support traffic needs through the next five years. They knew they had sufficient capacity for call handling and voice processing, but wanted to be sure that the customer experience would not suffer, especially during seasonal spikes in caller activity. A five-month project uncovered some issues that would arise under stress and were able to tune the voice processing system to the point where there were only 20 errors in the course of 40,000 calls per week. The utility used the service to provide regulators with evidence that it complied to requirements that contact centers be available to receive calls in the event of emergency. Empirix simulated and measured the ability to deliver calls to the correct sites and provided reports that certified compliance to the government requirements.

The value of testing is its ability to detect potential problems in advance. Major infrastructure providers, like Avaya, Cisco and Genesys, partner with Empirix to provide their prospects with the confidence they need to justify the acquisition and deployment of a new system. Empirix’s services model should be a welcome innovation to the equipment providers because they are no longer vying for the same discretionary capital spending budget items. That means that Empirix’s goal and role is to be a trusted provider of “end-to-end” quality assurance testing based on a combination of experience and vertical knowledge.

Whether you love it, hate it or just don’t get it, micro-blogging platform Twitter is a social media force to be reckoned with. Voxeo has an answer for it in its newly IMified-enabled platform that includes automated handling of both inbound and outbound Twitter traffic as part of Unified Self-Service. As we discussed in this post, Voxeo acquired IMified to reap the benefits of long-standing investment in and commitment to multiple flavors of Instant Messaging (IM). Its platform enables companies to automate the process of receiving and responding to customer queries via IM.

Today Voxeo revealed that the IMified platform is able to monitor Twitter “Tweets” for the mention of an enterprise’s brand, products or services and respond in kind. More likely, the Twitter-bots will detect when customers or prospects have questions, comments or purchase intents that can be addressed by live agents. If it is a partially formed query, the bots can elicit more detail before bringing the agent into the mix. For instance, if it spots a complaint about a flat-screen TV from a major manufacturer, it can ask the disgruntled customer to provide the model number and date of purchase before engaging a technician in what could be an expensive trouble-shooting exercise.

The beauty of Twitter, according to Dan York, Voxeo’s Director of Conversations, is that it has the potential to take the IVR (interactive voice response) unit out of the critical path and enable customers to define the way that they want to communicate with their vendors. It passively “listens” and then responds in kind.

It is early days for the new platform and Voxeo’s mission initially is to put tools in the hands of developers that enable them to add Twitter to the self-service mix. That means providing code to download, developer workshops and sample bots to illustrate the value of the new service. Use cases will follow and, given Twitter’s high profile of late, we expect there to be a lot of interest.

York sees the greatest value to gravitate toward national or global companies who are looking for ways to scale up efforts to monitor and respond to the fast-growing stream of Tweets. As he observes, “If we can answer the questions before they get to a human, we are providing better and more cost effective customer service.” Voxeo started with IVR and then added all the other media and provide ways for application developers to enable their clients to interact with customers in the manner that they choose.

The adoption of voiceprints to authenticate wireless subscribers is accelerating, thanks to a new installation of PerSay’s VocalPassword(TM) developed and installed by Turkish speech application specialist SPEECHOUSE at Vodafone Turkey. With roughly 16 million subscribers, Vodafone Turkey is the second largest mobile carrier in the country. Yet, if past is prologue, the incorporation of voice authentication into the customer care fabric of any Vodafone subsidiary is bound to have implications across all of its properties – an empire of over 300 million customers.

The deployment as a milestone in a couple of respects. The mobile market holds huge potential for speaker authentication for customer care and electronic payments. In addition, Vodafone Turkey clearly sees subscriber authentication as a source of differentiation in a long-standing battle for share versus Turkcell. In that pursuit, SPEECHOUSE has successfully integrated speaker authentication into the IVR-based Vodafone Voice Portal Platform. The immediate result is the use of a spoken password for secure self service applications the mobile equivalent of password reset, GSM PUK (Personal Unlocking Key) reset.

We’ll be learning more about the details and timing of the complete in the coming days to include in an advisory, and in our long-standing set of company and deployment dossiers.

It’s time to fuel more speculation surrounding the launch of a more broadly accessible Google Voice. The buzz started last week when John Fontana at Network World (among others) reported that Google had reserved 1 million telephone numbers from its IP-telephony carrier, Level 3. In many ways, claiming such a large block of numbers is the antithesis of the “bring your own phone number” strategy we discussed in this post; but it does suggest that Google is poised to fulfill on any strategy it might pursue to grow Google Voice’s business.

Step one, it appears, will be to broaden the base of users beyond the original GrandCentral customers. To this point, Google Phone has been in a very controlled beta mode with a phased conversion of GrandCentral customers taking place over the past few months. Opening the prospect base beyond the largely geeky community of original GrandCentral users is a major re-focusing of the product marketing efforts. The motivation, of course, is to build more phone-based activity originating or terminating at Google-controlled endpoints. The selling points will be single-number, find-me/follow me phone service.

Today, Phil Wolff at Skype Journal raised the possibility of a totally different scenario. In well less than 140 characters, he asked in a recent Tweet, “Might Google’s millon phone numbers be for Android devices?” With Skype proving to be a popular application on Apple’s iPhone, it makes sense for Google to bake in a Google Voice-based client that extends some of the often-used call management and messaging features to Google-branded phones, as well as netbooks or other appliances with Android as its operating system.

Another interesting scenario might be to incorporate the phone numbers into Web-based ad campaigns. At a minimum, the use of newly assigned numbers can support call tracking, as proof of efficacy. The use of a Google Voice number adds the ability for an individual or small business to treat incoming calls differently based on Caller ID or other factors, as well as the ability for the phone system to take a stab at transcribing voice messages and presenting them as text or email to the businessperson.

This classic Google “soft roll-out” fuels both speculation and anticipation. Time and experience will determine the actual tactics.