Today’s Free DA offerings are the most visible (or audible) entry points for mass market local mobile search. In this advisory, we assess the offerings of AT&T, Google, Jingle and Microsoft to see how well they fulfill the promise of delivering valuable, current local information to people on-the-go.
Continue Reading March 5th, 2008 Greg Sterling
The metric for success for customer care voice self-services should not be based on automation rates but rather on task completion. And whether it’s for directory assistance, voicemail transcription or voice self-service applications, it has become increasingly clear that human beings will always have a role to play in the call workflow.
Continue Reading February 27th, 2008 Dan Miller
It takes a recession, technological uncertainties and a weak dollar to convince global enterprises to take a closer look at hosted and managed services providers. A tipping point has apparently been reached across a broad spectrum of software firms. In this advisory, Opus Research takes a closer look at three very different solutions with Genesys Labs (subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent), Voxify and SpinVox.
Continue Reading February 20th, 2008 Dan Miller
Microsoft is set to pay a hefty premium ($44.6 billion) to pre-empt others from acquiring Yahoo. While there are several areas of duplication and redundancy, a Yahoo subsidiary of Microsoft is well-positioned to take on Google and capture a significant share of local search and mobile commerce spending.
Continue Reading February 1st, 2008 Greg Sterling
In 2008, the CAT community will bring more products and services to market that integrate automated speech with wireless bandwidth and computer processing as a way to improve the user experience for search, navigation and entertainment. Instead of pushing the proverbial envelope of technology and capabilities, this trend will put an emphasis on packaging and promotion of available technology building blocks.
Continue Reading January 30th, 2008 Dan Miller
It is good news for the voice authentication community when a billion-dollar leader in the customer data integration industry adds voice biometrics to its product line. With Acxiom joining VoiceVerified to offer the SoundAccess caller authentication, a significant presence in data integration for financial services companies joins the voice authentication community.
Continue Reading December 20th, 2007 Dan Miller
The high profile advertising campaign for the SYNC is having its effect. For the first time in 12 months, Ford’s unit sales had a modest increase. More importantly, SYNC demonstrates that multivendor solutions (meaning Microsoft and Nuance) are more than viable in the automotive vertical.
Continue Reading December 11th, 2007 Dan Miller
Mobile America will be subject to a “Coke-versus-Pepsi†like battle pitting a newly “open†Verizon Wireless against the locked-down AT&T Mobility/iPhone combo. Last week, Verizon Wireless reversed its hard-line stance against “open access†to its network. Creating terms for certifying third-party applications, devices and software amounts to a radical change in its business model. Or does it?
Continue Reading December 5th, 2007 Dan Miller
With more than 150 people in attendance at Voice Biometrics Conference London, Nov. 28-29, top vendors and implementers of voice biometric-based authentication and identification solutions defined future products, services and positioning. Recent security breaches militate toward broader deployment of voice biometrics, as does the growth of mobile commerce. Thus, the dialogue will continue between buyers, prospects and solutions providers.
Continue Reading December 4th, 2007 Dan Miller
Unified communications calls for traditional routing technology providers to integrate with the top providers of collaboration and Web-services middleware. Thus it is of necessity that Nortel (and its peers) continue to interoperate with both Microsoft and IBM, the leading purveyors of middleware and collaboration software.
Continue Reading November 16th, 2007 Dan Miller
