According to this announcement, BT is featuring highly flexible pricing arrangements for its Next Generaion Contact Centre as an enticement to new customers. It even follows the classic “freemium” model by offering “three months and 50 agents free of charge for all customers signing a contract for NGCC before 31 March 2010″ (subject to certain conditions).

BT’s NGCC services are supported by data centers on three continents. Its OneVoice offering was launched in December 2009 in conjunction with Cisco as part of its global, cloud-based IP telephony portfolio. Now, two months on, BT’s applying some of the new age marketing methodologies to try to accelerate global acceptance. The granularity of the offers is impressive. Enterprise customers can choose among “per concurrent agent”, “per logged-in agent” or choose to pay per usage, based on “per effective hour or even per effective minute”, starting as low as 4 pence per minute.

Incumbent carriers, like BT and its western European peers like Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia and Telefonica are playing the important role of catalyst for enterprise customers that are making the transition to IP-Telephony. AT&T, Verizon Business and QWEST are in a similar position in North America. Thus far BT, with such a granular offer is the most aggressive in creating a package that lowers entry barriers posed by high prices and complexity.

The cause of life-like Text-to-Speech rendering is about to take a giant step forward when film critic Roger Ebert appears on Oprah. For those who have not followed Mr. Ebert’s personal history, he has spent the past few years unable to eat or speak after undergoing cancer-related surgery. This essay, excerpted from an article he wrote for Esquire magazine is one of the most moving personal diaries I have ever read, and provides testimony to the quality of his mind and spirit.

In this blog post, Ebert describes how the discovery of a Scottish company called CereProc convinced him (and his wife) that the automated system could render his voice with the pronunciation, inflections and levels of enthusiasm characteristic of his banter in better days. As Ebert explains, his wife Chaz “could tell it was me. For one thing it knew exactly how I said ‘I.’” And, as Ebert himself wrote about hearing the rendering, “To hear him coming from my own computer made me ridiculously happy.”

And now, for the rest of the story. The Edinburgh address was something of a tip-off. The company’s chief technology officer, Dr Matthew Aylett, was the senior development engineer at Rhetorical Systems (which was acquired by Nuance – during its days as Scansoft in 2002). In that role he “was responsible for the design, implementation, and testing of the company’s core speech technology” which differentiated itself from the pack with its “lifelike” rendering of text. At CereProc, he’s joined by Christopher Pidcock, who is described as “the architect of Rhetorical’s state of the art voice creation system.”

Just as Oprah and Ashton Kutcher fueled a media-driven craze that led to a meteoric rise in awareness of Twitter, the popular TV host, with a special assist from Roger Ebert stand a good chance of popularizing life-like TTS. It is fitting that Rhetorical Systems’ alums stand to benefit, but other technology providers – including Nuance, Loquendo, SVOX, Wizzard Software, Acapela, among others- will benefit as well.

It was gratifying to see this post by Tim Hastings in ReadWriteWeb, addressing “multi-factor authentication in the cloud”. I was especially interested to note that the dynamic duo of VMWare and Intel are sponsors of the ReadWrite Cloud “channel”, which I guess makes RWW a network of sorts.

Hastings correctly notes that many recent high-profile phishing attacks started by overcoming weak security technologies and protocols surrounding GMail passords. He correctly points out that the most common security mechanisms employed to control access to information “that’s out there” are woefully lacking. Both username and password are a single factor – something you know. So the word is spreading that “stronger authentication” is sorely needed.

In the article Hastings also cites the multi-factor approaches of two of the leading e-commerce cloud operators, Amazon.com and Google Apps. Amazon goes to the expense of distributing token key-fobs that display limited time, single use passwords. That’s got to be music for technology provider Gemalto.

There was also this link to an enticing menu of “identity management add-ons” for Google Apps, from the likes of Ping Identity, TriCipher, SADA Systems, MultiFactor Corporation, eForcers, Yubico and others. Some of the technologies highlight the convenience of “single sign-on” access to a multiplicity of Web services. Others build their value proposition on “tokenless” authentication – primarily treating a browser as something you have and info in an enterprise directory (such as Microsoft’s ActiveDirectory) as the basis for managing something you know, such as username and password.

The move to IP-Telephony has opened the door to more interesting voice applications and the “virtualization” of telecommunications infrastructure. The corresponding popularization of cloud computing and distriubuted apps, including support of mobile devices, heightens the need for stronger authentication. Based on the pricing in the Google Marketplace, the rack rate for tokenless authentication infrastructure is about $3 per month per protected account, which can be discounted to as little as $30 per year. Turning the phone or browser into a soft token authenticates the device being used, not the individual using it. For the growing number of use cases where strong authentication is mandatory, an approach that uses biometrics (fingerprints, voiceprints or retinal scans) will also be mandatory. For mobile phones – indeed all phones – voice is the most natural biometric.

There’s the chain of causality. Communications apps are moving inexorably into “the cloud”. The cloud has become conspicuously vulnerable to hacker attacks and malicious access. At the same time, a multiplicity of applications and use cases call for stronger authentication of the individuals who are gaining access to cloud-based data and other resources. Today’s solutions, that emphasize the convenience of single sign on while touting the strength of their multi-factor approach, are much better at authenticating devices or browsers, not individuals. Only a biometric is associated with “something you are” (as opposed to “something you have” or “something you know”, which are fairly easily compromised). Add the fact that voice “makes sense” for phone based applications, and I rest my case.

Life-like text-to-speech rendering is one of those evergreen, yet elusive, opportunities for advancement in speech processing. About 5 years ago, Rhetorical (now part of Nuance) and AT&T (with Natural Voices) were able to demonstrate TTS software that synthesized spoken utterances from text and with pitch, timbre, prosody and other traits of particular speakers could be rendered in real-time. The primary objective, at the time, was to eliminate the need for businesses to hire “expensive live talent” to serve as the “voice of the enterprise” or “voice of the brand” on interactive voice response systems (IVRs).

The ensuing years have witnessed industry consolidation coupled with geographic expansion. Rhetorical was acquired by Nuance in 2004. AT&T transferred exclusive rights to resell Natural Voices TTS to Wizzard Software. Other members of the TTS community underwent similar transformation.Suffice it to say that supporting multiple voices in over two-dozen languages has become the table stakes to play in the global TTS game, with Nuance, Loquendo, Alcatel/Lucent joined by roughly six other firms in vying for market share. I’m in the process of compiling and writing an Advisory to address many of the new opportunities that Recombinant Communications concept creates for text-to-speech synthesis. In addition with the working title “Recombinant Communications Spells New Life for Text-to-Speech”.

Contact center-centric approaches can be seen as IVR enhancements. In the world of RC, a new community of developers have discovered new potential for core TTS capabilities. These days, an inordinate amount of attention is being paid to spoken input: for text messaging, for mobile search and for transcription of voice mail, Tweets and input to social sites. However, it has not taken long for the community of developers to discover that, in the “hands-free/eyes forward/location aware” world of the modern automobile, spoken output is equally important.

Text readers are a ready-made opportunity for email, newspapers and downloaded ebooks. Turn-by-turn directions, complete with street names, have always sounded disjointed or downright robotic. That’s all changing. As I’ll discuss in the forthcoming advisory, tools from the likes of Nuance and others, can help developers build a better user experience and life-like rendering of text is core. It’s the source of audible differentiation for a wide variety of solutions providers.

When first we met Spoken Communications more than four years ago, it was engaged in re-engineering contact centers so that super-agents, embodying “best practices” could serve as real time coaches for groups of customer care representatives. Today, by announcing this alliance with a UK-based mobile application distributor, the center of gravity moves steadily away from the enterprise contact center and more deeply into the mobile experience. It is a direct result of Spoken’s acquisition of GotVoice in October 2009.

At that time, the company seemed to be justifying the purchase as a natural extension of its presence in enterprise contact centers and played up the ability to integrate its voicemail transcription capabilities into Microsoft Exchange-based email systems. But the lure of mobile is obviously too strong, and Spoken/GotVoice has found a point of ingress as the white label voicemail-to-text transcription solution that will be branded as ROKVoice. In addition GotSearch will be marketed outside the United States under the ROKSearch brand. For its part, ROK Entertainment adds two speech-enabled utilities to a portfolio of services that it licenses to mobile operators. Its flagship service, ROK TV, provides a mechanism for streaming video entertainment to mobile devices. But its full line of products are illustrated on this page, and include a wide variety of voice, video and text “mashups” – such as a “caption creator” service that let’s users upload pictures to a mobile site and designate “thought bubbles” to appear on the screen.

In November, 2009, ROK Entertainment acquired at text-to-speech rendering specialist called Textic, citing the opportunity to present Web-based information over mobile devices to the visually impaired. Yet, we believe that they’ll find many product extensions that benefit from lifelike rendering of text (e-readers come to mind). ROK Entertainment strikes me as a prototypic mobile Recombinant Communications application provider. Its products page resembles a list of mobile mashups as well as tools for its customers to do their own customization (exemplified by the “caption creator”). It also seems to recognize the value of employing the full gamut of modalities in its line of entertainment software – supporting voice, visual and tactile interactions. As a global channel into mobile markets, ROK is a good partner for Spoken.

…or is it Purity of Essence? [movie buffs will get it]

This announcement from Microsoft and Amazon.com certainly leaves a lot to the imagination, especially when thinking about Recombinant Communications (RC) tactics. In it, Microsoft reveals that Amazon.com is paying an undisclosed sum and entering an agreement by which each company provides “access to the other’s patent portfolio” which “covers a broad range of products and technology, including coverage for Amazon’s popular e-reading device, Kindle™”.

Even though Microsoft says that it has entered more than 600 deals since it started its licensing program in late 2003, this one is of great interest as both companies position themselves to offer new services in opposition to non-traditional competitors who are fellow software superpowers. Microsoft makes a point of mentioning that it has an interest in the publishing platform embedded in Amazon.com’s Kindle. That would signal a direct assault against Apple’s iTunes-based e-commerce platform, as well as some preemptive positioning versus Google’s ever-growing roster of cloud-based resources. Apropos of “the cloud”, Microsoft’s statement also makes mention of Amazon’s Linux-based technology. This really is losing one’s religion around Windows-based servers.

The fate of Windows Phone is another matter. With Microsoft showcasing a graphics-laden, Zune-like roster of applets running on a range of mobile devices, the idea of piecing together a back-end system that is “the best of…” cloud-based e-commerce resources from Amazon and Microsoft has tremendous merit. The fact that Amazon is paying Microsoft to cement the relationship without discussing which elements are of interest to the Web-based retailing giant is also ripe for speculation. At a minimum, it signals that the fast-growing (though comparatively diminutive) Amazon Web Services group will be able to make more serious inroads into enterprise IT infrastructure, especially where companies are committed to Windows-based servers.

At a minimum, Amazon.com’s EC2 (Electronic Commerce Cloud) and Microsoft’s Azure, will start looking a lot more like one another. This spells a stronger position for both in yet another large area of opportunity now dominated by Oracle and fast-growing Salesforce.com. An RC-based approach is key to understanding how these developments will play out. Open-ended, cross-licensing agreements makes it possible for either company to piece together solutions from both “open” and proprietary elements of their current technologies. RC makes it possible to re-assemble these pieces and move them forward into new products and services that directly address a customer’s (or end user’s) needs. It may be as mundane as providing a better way to re-schedule a sales call in Outlook or Microsoft CRM from a mobile phone, or it might be a full-blown effort to make Microsoft’s Azure a stronger competitor to Google Apps.

From our perspective, this is a watershed deal that reflects a major change in the competitive landscape.

[Update: Long-time Microsoft follower Mary-Jo Foley posted these comments earlier. At base, she says that Amazon is "using Linux" to pay Microsoft for unspecified patent infringements. She notes that, although this was not a joint press release, there was no corresponding notice from Amazon.

This hardly sounds like the basis of a joint development effort in cloud computing or e-publishing.]

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

Webcast On-Demand – Sign-up Below!

There’s still time to register for this free Webcast. I’ll be sharing results from a survey of “shoppers” regarding actual use of multiple channels when dealing with vendors.

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

Both Verizon Wireless and Skype have confirmed that they have forged an agreement that will “deeply embed” Skype’s services into selected smartphones marketed to Verizon Wireless’ 91 million subscribers. As a result of the agreement, Skype will be “always on” for owners of BlackBerry Storm 9530, Storm2 9550, Curve 8330, Curve 8530, 8830 World Edition and Tour 9630 smartphones, as well as the following Android-based phones: including the Motorola DROID and DEVOUR and the HTC Eris. They will be able to avail themselves of free Skype-to-Skype voice calls, as well as IM-based chat, and “status indicators” for Skype subscribers around the world. They will also be able to initiate outbound calls to international numbers at Skypes “low rates” (as low as $0.02/minute or a flat $3 per month if Skype’s current pricing is applied).

The description of the range of services to be offered sounds exactly like the Skype application offered on the iPhone. The most salient difference will be that the app will be running constantly in background on the nine devices described (which is not possible on the iPhone). It also marks the symbolic end to Verizon’s (as well as its wireless cohort’s) long-standing concern that VoIP services offered over the data link will cannibalize their core voice revenues. John Stratton, Verizon’s Chief Marketing Officer, told attendees of the Mobile World Congress that he was not concerned about either erosion of the voice traffic on its network or a decline in quality that would result from congestion caused by massive demand for Voice-over-3G.

Stratton said that the application was jointly developed from the ground up, leaving many details up for interpretation. My own belief is that the always-on Skype will be “link agile” using WiFi when available, 3G in some cases or the Verizon cell network if required to sustain qualities. At least that’s how I would architect the service given that subscribers must contract with Verizon for one of its Voice and Data plans. According to an article by Roger Chen in the Wall Street Journal, the “cheapest monthly voice plan now costs $40 for 450 minutes, and a $30 data plan is required with any smart phone.” So you may as well make the best use of all the links you can.

As for the impact on the wireless VoIP world at large, the application seems underwhelming. Sure it rattles AT&T Mobility’s cage by offering a nailed up voice-over-3G service one week after AT&T made it clear that it would continue its WiFi only approach. Yet, the range of services that are offered have an entry-level feeling to them. Meanwhile, Mobile World Congress was brimming with some really impressive X-over-wireless-IP services. Of special interest to me is a “video calling over the Internet” offered through the iTunes store by Fring and this intriguing voice-to-voice universal translator service offered by wireless personal assistant specialist VoxOx.

Harking back to my post about “satsificing”, I’m not sure that any of the services will work at high-levels of quality in all instances, but they are working well enough to make them ready for prime time.

A couple of weeks ago, in this post, I mentioned that Alcatel-Lucent had assembled some very impressive resources to enable carriers to lure third-party developers. Yesterday, at the Mobile World Congress (MWC2010), the company formally launched a much better organized, “cloud-based developer suite” which includes an aggregation of API’s (application programming interfaces) and promotes what it calls “a game-changing” business model to lure more developers to take advantage of features and services embedded in the public network.

The core of the platform is ALU’s “Application Exposure Suite”, which gives developers access to API’s that suppot such things as location services, along with fundamental capabilities such as provisioning, billing, system management and reporting. Newly announced at MWC is a Virtual Sandbox, which has a “try-before-you-buy” feel to it and enables developers to build applications, test them and simulate traffic across a wide range of devices and environments.

In this press release, ALU asserts that it is the first into the market with such a comprehensive approach. It sees it as an important mechanism to support a global community of 14+ million mobile and telecom application developers. There are also hooks into resources that support distribution and billing for a range of new applications. The ability to developer, test and implement new applications quickly is a pre-requisite to the age of Recombinant Communications. Access to well-defined API’s is crucial to the introduction of new communications-enabled business processes (CEBPs) that extend enterprise resources to mobile devices, improve a caller’s experience, or make the lives of road warriors (both sales people and service techs) more efficient. More importantly, it better fits the “smart pipe” strategies that carriers are adopting to stave off the slow decline into pure commoditization.

In this press release, Nuance announced that it is acquiring MacSpeech, a company that has been developing speech recognition resources for Apple’s MacIntosh computers since 1996. Because MacSpeech started licensing Dragon Dictate in 2008, this acquisition may amount to a mere formality. But Peter Mahoney, Dragon’s general manager (as well as senior vice president of Nuance) explains that the two companies will work more closely to bring a line of Dragon branded dictation software to market that is “100 percent Mac.”

Symbolically, the move signals that Nuance (especially with the Dragon brand) is emerging as the most-favored speech-processing technology across Apple’s broad spectrum of computing and communications platforms, including personal computers, notebooks, laptops, iPhones, iPods and (we would supposed) the upcoming iPad. As we’ve all learned from the “Google phenomenon”, the more utterances that a company is able to collect on behalf of a broad customer base, the better the odds of accurate rendering of spoken words. Stated differently, deeper integration into Apple’s application environment should translate into a better user experience as those users help computers “learn” to understand what they are saying.

Google’s “cloud-based” approach to speech recognition makes it “platform agnostic”, therefore we will continue to see speech-enabled Google applications on iPhones and other connected platforms. Google will continue to use the voluminous amounts of spoken phrases to expand a portfolio of offerings that already includes search, transcription and translation. Nuance’s is responding by forging relationships aimed to make its speech-enabled applications work well on Mac’s and other Apple branded products, while at the same time supporting multimodal communications on a wide variety of mobile handsets.

Now, all eyes (or ears) should be on Microsoft, the only other “superpower” with the ability to define and refine speech-enabled user experience across platforms and modalities. With its own speech recognition “engine”, a dedicated speech app server farm called Tellme and some excellent “voice search” apps operating under the Bing brand, it has the potential to compete. But, as Greg Sterling noted in this post about the introduction of its new mobile operating system, it has definitely bestowed second-class status to its voice enabled services.