The novel aspect of the new approach is as follows: Targeting its installed based of 4,500 companies running its Customer Interaction Center platform, it provides a complete application development and distribution platform for mobile apps that can run on popular OSes (iOS, Android, Windows…), and conform to Facebook’s OS as well. But the code-base for the customer care apps – focusing on deep integration with CIC – will be developed and run on one centralized server using tools (resembling C#) which any competent mobile app developer will recognize and be able to use. The integration with CIC means that mobile customers, when they press a “click-to-call” button, will be able to see their status in queue, decide whether to stay “on hold,” schedule a call back, engage in a text chat, or take another action.

From the contact center operator’s perspective, calls (or chats) are initiated by customers from their smartphones and brought into an intelligent queuing system along with as much context as can be gleaned from direct input, capture of activity streams, location and other metadata. Integration with CIC also means that call center managers as well as executives from multiple departments and business units will be able to view reports based on the activities of their mobile subscribers. They can learn the mix of devices or OSes originating calls; detect when customers are opting out of their automated system, correlate activities with business success; and a host of other analytic results that can be tailored to meet an executive’s requirements.

When they use Interaction Mobilizer, application developers generate a light-weight app (and a set of rules) to go through the approval process of each “app store” or outlet. Once approved, it can remain static. Upgrades or the addition of new features, functions or “connections” are introduced at the platform level, where development, care and feeding of the mobile app is conducted. Mobile customers download the app once; upgrades happen transparently. This is a win-win approach that minimizes friction with the mobile customer and staff expenses for the enterprise customer.

Interactive Intelligence has taken an “end-to-end” approach to app development that augments its “all-in-one” approach to customer interaction management. More details on pricing and product attributes will be available when the service is generally available “in Q2 2012.” It will be delivered under license as on “on-premises” solution or as part of the Communications as a Service (CaaS) approach that InIn has been pursuing with CIC in the past three years, with the price derived from “unique mobile app connections per day.”

By 2006, Tellme had graduated to become the platform for automated, “paid” DA services from AT&T Wireless (first Cingular) and Verizon landlines. Carriers were able to charge $2.00 or more per call (which phone companies continue to do today). At the time, Tellme co-founder Mike McCue confessed to Business Week reporter Steve Hamm that “only about a million people” were using the free voice portal service.

When Microsoft bought Tellme, roughly a year later, execs in Redmond saw Tellme’s voice portal and DA platform as a way to take on Google in the local, mobile search marketplace. By the time the deal had consummated, Google countered by launching its own “free,” speech-enabled DA service, Goog411 and joined Jingle Networks and a small handful of other companies trying to coax callers into using their phones to conduct local searches and carry out business.

The idea of using your voice to transform the phone into a mobile assistant was on target, but very premature. After investing in both technology and market conditioning, Jingle Networks was purchased by Marchex in April 2011 and is now integrated in its mobile voice search product line. Google shuttered Goog411 in October 2010. At the time it noted that smartphone users could conduct voice search using Google’s speech recognition in conjunction with Google Maps.

On June 1, Microsoft will follow in Google’s footsteps (or voiceprints?) by closing its hosted voice search platforms and directing people to “visit www.bing.com on [your] PC or mobile device.” There’s no mention of a speech-enabled option – just the end of Tellme-powered voice search as we know it. By contrast, when Google closed GOOG411, it let it be known that the service had helped it build a corpus of utterances to make its voice-search more accurate, and the microphone icon is a ubiquitous feature on all Android-based devices.

In the 20 months since Google closed GOOG411, Microsoft has busily gone about recasting Tellme from the innovative provider of Dialtone 2.0 to a cast-off that is now part of multi-channel customer care specialist 24[7] Inc. During that time, the mobile assets that were exemplified by Bing411 and the Tellme Voice Portal were largely neglected and, presently, will cease operating altogether.

Six years ago, we believed that wireless DA was a viable, and sure to be profitable, vehicle for mobile business search culminating in commerce. Today, it is more likely that mobile assistants, like Apple’s Siri, are more likely to take on that role. Siri is destined to have company in the very near future as solutions providers emerge from the ranks of knowledge management, artificial intelligence, speech analytics and other closely related disciplines. Indeed personal assistants, front-ending the Internet’s vast array of information, navigation and communications resources are successfully supplanting directory assistance, front-ending little more than an enhanced phone directory, as the go-to resource to support of local commerce.

As we’ve noted before, Sensory, Inc., has long been devoted to supporting TrulyHandsfree(TM) voice control of devices and media, especially in the automotive setting, where wake up words need to be distinguished from road noise or other random sounds in the background. Voice activation has been available on the Samsung Galaxy S2 for roughly a year now. In order to reduce the power consumption required to have the device constantly listening for its wake-up words, Sensory has made sure that the technology for the trigger words are “deeply embedded” in the devices hardware.

According to Mozer, the company “always had speaker verification on our chips.” However, to support the new offer, the company switched to a new HMM (hidden Markov model) based biometric engine in order to provide higher accuracy and lower false acceptance or false rejection rates. Sensory is demonstrating an alpha version of the system running on an Android device and using the passphrase “Hello Blue Genie”. Mozer trained the smartphone by repeating the phrase three times. Then he was able to unlock and activate the phone by saying the phrase, whereupon it said “Greetings Todd Mozer.” When i said the phrase after he had trained it, the phone woke up, but displayed the word “Rejected,” and I was unable to activate any of its features or services.

A beta version of the voice activation with speaker identification technology will be available under license from Sensory in the coming week. As the press release explains, details are available from info@sensoryinc.com

AT&T’s John Donovan provides more detail on the future offering here. In essence, when the APIs are released in June, developers can look forward to making it easier for the people who use their apps to use their voice (and probably their mobile phones) to carry out general web searches, find local businesses, engage in question and answer discussions and originate messages, including voice mail and text messages. Anticipating tighter coupling with Web-enabled TVs, there will also be a pre-built interface to AT&T’s U-verse® electronic programming guide.

Here’s AT&T’s YouTube video providing background on Watson and “how it will work” both for application developers and users:

In short, AT&T will be encouraging the developer community to take advantage of the market conditioning that Apple has undertaken by promoting the Siri Virtual Assistant through mass media advertising. But Apple, with Siri, is promoting the “closed garden” approach that has made the iPhone so successful. AT&T is making it clear that it’s engine, and the one million person hours of R&D will be there for the taking (though the mention of 600 patents) looks like a veiled warning that some metering of the use is inevitable.

Watson is already in use for voice search on iPhones and Android-based devices. An app called Speak4It is a mashup that includes AT&T Watson, and has been available since mid-2010. In addition, the AT&T Translator App, described here, has been a showcase for Watson technologies’ ability to support 7 different languages.

While many in the business and tech press think AT&T’s new offer portends a “smack-down with Siri,” that is not necessarily true. What we are destined to see is geometric growth in the energy put forth by developers to bring take advantage of voice as the “natural interface” for phones and other mobile/personal devices. Apple will continue to use its experience with Siri to refine the service offerings are Siri-enabled. Brisk sales of the iPhone 4S (which is almost identical to the iPhone 4, save for the inclusion of Siri), attest to its economic value. Apple’s implementation of Siri as a “beta” feature of the phone, give it sole access to the “Home” button as the mechanism to summon Siri (as well as the native accelerometer as a mechanism to support the “Raise to Speak” function).

Meanwhile, developers can look forward to more tools for using natural language in specific domains. AT&T has deemed general search, Q&A, business search and control of TVs to be worthy of early attention. Our belief is that positive experience in these domains will lead to the development of more “speechable moments,” as I started calling them back in mid-2010. Today there are more than a dozen firms – coming out of a diverse development community that, in addition to speech processing, spans customer care analytics, automotive electronics, telematics and pure academic research – that have formidable software platforms optimized for understanding the semantic structure, logical content and practical context of spoken phrases.

At this stage in the markets maturity, we’re happy to see AT&T entering the market with tools and resources to support the developer community.

I certainly hope this doesn’t start a rash of “if Steve were alive…” or “WWSD” comments, though it’s already too late for that. More to the point, iCloud, and its derivatives like iTunes Music Match and other forms document or info sharing, still has major issues when it comes to usability and transparency. In my experience, it is erratic in its ability to update calendars, contact information and other shared info. It has also been incredibly opaque when it comes to set up and initiation (through settings on each device and in iTunes), as well as its inability to manage memory on my iPhone. As I blissfully thought I could now listen to music from my library – whether it is located on the device or “in iCloud” – I learned too late that every song with a cloud icon had to be downloaded to my device in order to be played. An error message that rivals Microsoft’s “Blue Screen of Death” when I sync my iPhone and a stern warning that I have exceeded memory limits on my device.

That sucks! And it’s largely because iCloud, unlike Siri, does not do a very good job of balancing between resources in the cloud and resources on the device. If you unwittingly ask it to download more content than your device can hold, it tries to do so, until it fails.

What’s more, iCloud, unlike Siri, doesn’t learn. In today’s wireless world the smartphone+cloud paradigm is taking hold. Both iCloud and Siri take advantage of that fact. But Siri does it much more intelligently, and transparently. Siri is designed to “understand” the phone’s owner. That is vital for both task completion and personalization. It is dynamic and improves overtime as the owner provides more data and spoken input.

iCloud may be the progeny of Mobile Me, but to many Apple owners, it’s just opaque – a sticker on the side of the iPhone or iPad package or a Web page that equates it to “Find My iPhone” or “Find My Friends.” I know that Apple has long-range plans to make iCloud the repository for all the data I originate from my iOS devices. But Apple has a long way to go in educating the public to change its behavior. “Imagine… a world without ‘File/SaveAs’ menus.” That’s gonna be a tough one to sell.

Meanwhile, just seeing Siri refer to Samuel L. Jackson as “Sam,” got me to train my phone to call me “Dan” (hey, its better than “Rock God”). I think the commercials are incredibly effective, even if “your mileage may vary” when it comes to every instance of using Siri. I’ve also noticed that people who are not of Sam or Zooey’s generation (meaning younger) are very comfortable dictating text messages or emails, looking for local eateries and other usecases that Apple has already anticipated. Success breeds more use. More use leads to more accuracy. More accuracy leads to more success. Ergo: “Success Breeds Success.” Now ask “What Would Steve Do?”

Ellis has been instrumental in developing and promoting Ford’s efforts to leverage both SYNC and its close sibling, SYNC Applink, as the mechanisms for individual drivers to use their favorite smartphone apps – hands-free and eyes-forward – through SYNC. Today, the list of featured apps includes Pandora, Stitcher, IHeartRadio, NPR News; but, through the Applink Developer Program, Ellis expects the list to continue to grow, thanks to development and marketing efforts by Ford and its partners.

Ford maintains its business model, which is to “sell more cars.” It is using SYNC as a differentiator for global initiatives to accomplish its sales goals by playing up how people can use their voice to personalize their in-car experience. In addition to encouraging more mobile app developers to make their wares compatible with SYNC, it has already made voice command work seamlessly in nine languages with emergency assistance in 34 languages.

The other initiatives that are of great importance is to strike a balance between the capabilities that are “embedded” in the car and resources that are in the cloud so that the services meet every driver’s requirement for reliability – regardless of location, velocity of travel or other circumstances. Whether it’s “brought-in” or “beamed in” it has to work every time.

The company, which has 1,500 customers, is now rolling out the service to organizations of all sizes and in all industry sectors. VPI’s value proposition is to “do all the work” of setting up an agent. The start-up process takes 4-6 weeks and accounts for about 3-4 “person days” all told. That includes feeding it the live recordings, suggested scripts and other tuning information. Unlike a typical speech IVR system, VirtualSource does not use or require companies to maintain logic trees. Instead, VPI uses about 10-20 recorded conversations (preferably with successful outcomes) and augments it with information, rules and logic from training manuals, call-flow diagrams or interviews with contact center managers or supervisors. Performance should improve with time, as the system carries out more and more conversations.

VPI customers can run the virtual agents side-by-side with live customer service reps. Comparisons of the two can be used to tune the virtual agent or to determine which tasks should are most eligible for automated handling. Visit here (scroll down) to listen to sample conversations. At this point, the company uses a slightly robotic aspect to the voice rendering, which allows the virtual agent to adapt more rapidly to dynamic conversations.

The “brain” or “intelligence engine” integrates important cognitive functions including “short- and long-term memory, natural language understanding, reasoning, learning mechanisms, goal-directed behavior and meta-cognition.” It’s service cloud is PCI-compliant and Botz believes that companies will see value in using virtual agents to receive payment instructions securely (less prone to human error or theft.)

VPI bills on a per use basis at $0.25 per minute (including tuning) with a monthly minimum and a one-year term agreement.

Singapore-based Utiba has spent more than a decade developing a software platform to support mobile financial services. It has established business relationships with scores of mobile carriers, as well as mobile payment platform providers including MasterCard’s association of payment card issuers and mobile commerce software specialist Alternet Systems Inc. All told, Utiba claims that its software is in use in 30 countries and that the “Utiba Mobility” platform has roughly 500 million subscribers giving rise to over 12 billion transactions each year. The platform enables those subscribers to send money, pay bill and receive payments, including wages and government transfer payments, from mobile phones.

Both Utiba and ValidSoft have been actively building a global footprint for secure mobile payments and e-commerce. Utiba is a private company and its revenue figures are not public. It has supported implementations such as G-Cash/Globe in the Philippines, Maxis Malaysia, True in Thailand and the Orascomm Group in Bangladesh. The relationship with Alternet Systems signals an intention to grow in North America.

As we’ve reported here, ValidSoft has been laying the foundation for growth in Western Europe, the Pacific Rim and North America. Clearly the planets are aligning for growth in the coming year.

LexisNexis started the wave when its Risk Solutions business unit introduced to new options to its Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) solutions targeting financial services, health care, government, and retail organizations. As described in this press release, the information giant has long offered a suite of identity proofing and authentication solutions, branded as Flex ID, Instant Authenticate, InstantID®, InstantID Q&A, Instant Verify, and TrueID®.

Kimberly Little, Director of Identity Authentication Solutions at LexisNexis spoke at VBC and provided us with more detail on the intent of the offer. The company has long offered biometric authentication based on fingerprints. It has now added the option for its customers to include voiceprints as an identifier and speaker verification as an authentication method to support phone based commerce for financial services or contact centers.

In addition, LexisNexis is providing the option for its clients to offer their customers a One Time Password, delivered as a text message, email or outbound phonecall when appropriate when businesses or government organizations require stronger authentication to support a transaction.

We were also pleased that two of the sponsors of VBC were able to launch new mobile products from the podium. Agnitio’s Emilio Martinez led off a panel on Mobile Authentication by introducing KIVOX Mobile and elaborating on how development for military, law enforcement and commercial markets has led them to shrink their speaker identification and authentication engine so that it can operate on an Android phone (coming soon on iPhone), even when it is disconnected from the wireless network.

SpeechPro formally announced VoiceKey, a new voice biometric platform that integrates and implements a number of the core technologies, features and functions that it has developed over the years. This includes the “fusion algorithms,” that have demonstrated improved accuracy; proprietary methods for liveness detection, along with gender detection and emotion detection; cross-channel verification based on short phrases; robust noise reduction and speech detection; multimodal capabilities, including support of mobile authentication.

Each of these announcements reflect the fact that voice biometric-based solutions are maturing. That was the major message behind a keynote address delivered by Nuance VP Dan Nordale and showing how the combination of voice authentication, natural language understanding and artificial intelligence was gearing up to support the best customer experience over phones, tablets and laptops.

The focus on mobile customer experience was further demonstrated by ValidSoft in a video demo of VALid and how a shopper could say pass phrase to authorize a payment and make a purchase. When Daniel Thornhill and Benoit Fauve walked through all the steps taking place “transparently” to the user, you realized that the system handled fraud reduction through detection of “SIM swapping,” location awareness and anti-SIM swapping, as well as the voice biometric – all part of its SMART security architecture for mobile payments.

On the other side of the globe, ValidSoft was making news through a partnership with Utiba, a Singapore-based mobile payments specialist whose network supports roughly 40 mobile network operators and banking customers around the world. The companies claim that the partnership will have the potential to serve roughly 500 million subscribers with Utiba platform. ValidSoft CEO Pat Carroll noted that the company handled over 12 billion mobile payments last year.

Partnerships that span transaction processing, identity management, mobile payments are evidence that the value of voice biometrics is appreciated among a broad set of solutions providers. More alliances are bound to follow.

There are already many use cases for location aware mobile. The technology grew out of a decade of E911 initiatives, which sought to pinpoint the origin of mobile calls to police or firefighters. Today, mobile subscribers (and mobile app developers) are well-aware of the power of local intelligence and can bake location awareness into 511 calls for traffic conditions or spoken versions of services that “find-the-nearest” ATM, gas station, restaurant or restroom. There are also obvious uses for businesses managing mobile workers or service fleets.

In this announcement, Voxeo notes that it will serve as a single source of location information from a number of carriers. It also notes that it is taking an approach that complies with Best Practices and Guidelines for Location-Based Services provided by the Cellular Telephone and Internet Association (CTIA). That means that end-users must opt-in or “subscribe” to the service. Among Voxeo’s service delivery options are “single or double opt-in” as well as SMS based confirmations.

More detailed information and support, including a description of the API is available here, including a phone number that demonstrates how the call-flow will work for subscription to LBS and retrieval of weather information. Developers will be pleased to find access to an API that is “fully compliant with industry standards as an extension of the Location RESTful API from GSMA’s OneAPI.” It is documented http://help.voxeo.com/helpserver/go/evolution/LBS.

To encourage use by developers, Voxeo offers 1,000 free geolocation look-ups through the API as well as access to its developer support resources.