Every press release or news item about speech-enabled mobile services now carries the sobriquet “Siri-like.” Its use is so frequent these days that it is highly likely that it will be added to the Oxford English Dictionary in the coming year. I mean this year the editors accepted the contemporary definitions of “OMG” and “LOL.” ’nuff said.

The reason that the term “Siri-like” is appearing so often is that there has been an acceleration in the introduction and marketing of new speech-enabled services. One that’s worth noting is SingTel deFIND, a version of voice search that is tailored specifically for “the unique style of English” that is spoken on the nation-island of Singapore.

SingTel turned to UK-based Novauris to build the corpus of localized utterances. The two companies have successfully introduced an application that delivers details on local shops, restaurants or retailers when a user simply says the name. Users can also search by category (e.g. Filipino restaurant) and the application will use GPS and SingTel’s “InSing” database to show what businesses are nearby.

In the coming months, we expect to see the introduction of speech-enabled mobile search and assistance apps to accelerate and that means there are lots more opportunities for firms that specialize in this sort of localization.

Categories: Articles

Tags: mobile speech, Novauris, localization, voice search, mobile commerce