In a pre-holiday-rock-your-world moment, Avaya and Salmat jointly announced a multi-million dollar (meaning between $10 and $20 million) deal whereby the Australian contact center outsourcer would replace its Genesys-based platform with “a broad suite of Avaya technology and expertise.” According to this media release, “Salmat will commence the rollout of the Avaya technology across all of its contact centre operations in February 2012.” It is expected to take 12 months to implement, at which time 7,500 contact center agents will be using Avaya’s technology.

According to coverage in the Australian press Salmat, which handles over 100 million inbound and outbound calls each year on behalf of its clients, had “scoured the world” for a new solution provider. Its vendor selection started with 10 prospective winners but, in the end, was winnowed down to Avaya and one other (unnamed) candidate.

We’ll presume that Genesys, as incumbent platform provider, was considered as a candidate from the start. Indeed, it had shown an impressive array of enhancements to its core Customer Interaction Manager (CIM), including the introduction of a Conversation Manager to support “intelligent” handling of multi-channel and multi-modal interactions. Genesys also has a longer history of hosted implementations of CIM as well as the use of the Genesys Voice Portal (and its precursor VoiceGenie platform) for applications involving voice-based authentication.

The transition to a totally new platform is, to the best of our understanding, something of a rip-and-replace operation during which business continuity could be something of a challenge. This is especially true because Avaya, has had a love/hate relationship with “hosted” or “cloud-based” implementations. The move to IP-based implementations provided some initiatives toward hosted renditions of IP-based ACD and Contact Center resources. According to literature, both Telecom Italia and Sprint have offered hosted renditions of Avaya’s IP-based call processing resources.

However, to the best of our knowledge, Avaya has yet to bless or integrate voice biometric authentication into its IP-based Contact Center or its Experience Portal. By contrast, Salmat has made a point of differentiating itself by offering caller authentication as a service to financial institutions, healthcare providers, telecom service providers and government agencies in Australia and New Zealand. We’re anxious to see how smoothly the re-hosting takes place in the coming year. And we want to welcome Avaya into the community of voice biometrics-based solution providers.

Cloud-based contact center specialist LiveOps is buying New Zealand-based DataSquirt for $12.5 million. As a result, LiveOps will take ownership of the firm that provides CONTACT(TM), a suite of services that augment the core, live agent/voice services with an array of delivery options that include text messages, email and Twitter. The new services, packaged as LiveOps Multichannel and LiveOps Mobile are “available for purchase” as of now, with general availability scheduled for the first week in December.

LiveOps has offered “white label versions of DataSquirt services to its clients for some time and held exclusive North American distribution rights since May of this year. The acquisition marks another step toward making CONTACT to market and integrate DataSquirt’s code and personnel into the LiveOps fold. This is consistent with the company’s policy of making sure all elements are both field-tested and “hardened” to operate well on the LiveOps platform.

Through acquisition, LiveOps is also adding over 60 mobile and multichannel clients. This, in turn, brings new use cases that make the “social/mobile/cloud” mantra more than just a series of buzz words, as well as case studies that show how well-recognized (and often conservative) outfits like ADT which made text messaging the preferred means to conduct “safety checks” with its guards; Amway, using the cloud to manage text and email messaging with its network of salespeople; and the Royal Mail Group (which operates the British Post Office) which added Twitter as a channel in and out of its contact centers.

But the acquisition is not primarily about adding new customers. LiveOps has already demonstrated the power of cloud-based resources to support a community of remote agents. They, in turn, have gained experience using social networks to maintain a sense of community and bolster morale among geographically-dispersed employees. These agents are likely to be more comfortable than their brick-and-mortar counterparts when communicating with customers and prospects – in addition to each other – using text, Tweets or email.

The growth of remote agents and the “fractional workforce” is a sign of the times. Our informal survey of contact center oursourcers shows that virtually every one of them is building more infrastructure to support growing communities of at home agents. With a history that dates back to 2000 (or 2002 when you consider the combination of LiveOps with CallCast’s platform) LiveOps was the first company to start tackling technological and social issues associated with building a business based on fostering the growth of work-at-home agent activities.

The acquisition of DataSquirt acknowledges that the integration of text messaging, social networks and email is a must to keep conversations growing on the platform.

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.

According to this document filed in the State of Delaware’s Division of Corporations, Yap, Inc., was quietly merged with a shell corporation owned by Amazon.com on September 8, 2011. While the surviving company retained the Yap Inc. name, the full meaning of the merger was made manifest earlier this week and has been covered well by Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic, Tricia Duryee in All Things D, and many others.

The consensus opinion is that Amazon will be launching its own “Siri Killer.” But that doesn’t fully explain the level of secrecy and subterfuge surrounding the initial acquisition. The dime dropped on Yap on September 8. A few weeks later, those of us who were participating in the beta of Yap’s Voicemail-to-text app (on the iPhone) were informed that the service would be discontinued as of October 20. Then there was something of a radio silence from the folks in Charlotte.

I don’t like to think of any product or service as a “killer.” When we look back on the 4th quarter of 2011, it will be very clear that, whether it succeeds, fails or just goes off line periodically, there is no question that the introduction of Siri on the iPhone 4S irreversibly changed the mobile device and services landscape. In preparation for the holiday buying season, the general public should be thrilled to find a wide variety of smartphones and tablets for sale, each with a price range, feature set and user interface designed to attract new customers – the non-geeks.

In this respect, the ability to understand spoken instructions or dictated messages “reliably-enough” at home, in the office, on noisy streets or public venues like airports is turning out to be table stakes for achieving mass market potential. We’re moving into the Star Trek-like world of talking tablets and. to avoid dependencies on third-party technology providers or “speech specialists” is now part of the Prime Directive.

There is no mention of the Yap acquisition on Amazon.com’s Web site, or in its most recent 10-Q filing at the SEC (dated October 26), nor is there a mention of an acquisition in other SEC filings. Therefore, the price paid must not have been material to Amazon.com’s general financial situation, the transaction may have been largely non-cash in nature, exchange of services or what amounts to a refinancing.

Much is made Yap’s proprietary technology. It’s “Speech Cloud” technology promised highly accurate rendering or transcribing of spoken words. It was a fully-automated solution, like Google Voice, but apparently was achieving high levels of accuracy without the benefit of Google-like scale for its corpus of captured utterances. Opus Research believes that its core speech processing engine is the AT&T Watson Speech Engine, though it hasn’t made that formal announcement and the Yap’s co-founder Igor Jablokov was a veteran of the Pervasive Computing division of IBM, where much of the speech processing technology now licensed to Nuance was developed.

Holiday shoppers will be presented with a wide variety of options and prices for devices that act as mobile assistants. Siri will be running on all manner of iOS-based devices. Nuance is offering Dragon Go! on iOS and Android devices as a very results oriented mobile assistant. Vlingo has been expanding its service offerings and geographic coverage. And now we can look forward to an Amazon.com branded product – most likely part of the Kindle family – that will leverage the Amazon.com e-commerce infrastructure (marketplace and checkout), understand commands and dictation, and probably offer more options for audio books.

Now our Prime Directive is to get more comfortable with all those Speechable Moments to be had.

Planning for Opus Research’s 2012 Voice Biometrics Conference New York on April 3rd-4th is in full swing and we’re pleased to announce that Nuance’s President, Sales and Marketing, Steve Chambers, will deliver a keynote address during the event. He will share his perspectives on how speaker verification, accurate speech recognition and artificial intelligence will help enterprises to anticipate a user’s intent and establish a foundation of trusted communications. Bringing these technologies together will provide a balance of secure interactions and a positive user experiences across channels including, traditional phones, mobile devices and e-commerce Web-sites.

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Nuance Communications issued a media alert revealing the results of a Twitter-based survey conducted over the past couple of weeks. Through the survey, the company sought to learn more about the general public’s exposure to the pain points created by cumbersome password management strictures and to gain insights into the attitudes that individuals have with respect to using their voiceprint as an alternative to multiple passwords.

Here are the important findings as reported by Nuance:

62 percent of respondents have more than 11 usernames and passwords, and that they forget their passwords between one and five times a month. Each time a password is forgotten it’s lost time that could be spent being more productive at work or at home. In addition, 74 percent of those surveyed have been blocked access to important information while using a mobile device because they could not remember their log-in information. The survey also found that 80 percent of respondents use the same password for multiple accounts if it fits the password criteria.

More detailed findings can be found here.

When viewed as a whole, the responses reveal that present solutions to mobile security are both inconvenient and insecure. There are no surprises in that. There should be no surprise in learning that 77 percent of respondents would be comfortable using voice biometrics as an alternative if it meant tighter security, and that a combination of voice and a password or PIN was preferred by 61 percent of those surveyed.

These findings are a significant upgrade from a survey conducted in 2009 by contactcentres.net in Australia and New Zealand. When asked about their preferred methods for identity verification, voice biometrics rated first, but only by 45% of participants, followed by PIN (21%), password (18%) and personal details or history questions (16%).

Nuance’s Twitter poll shows how dis-integrated our mobile identities have become. I fall into the category of individuals with well over 11 user names and password combinations across mobile communications and commerce sites. I was also one of the respondents who was locked out of a site after mis-remembering my password while trying to rebook a connecting flight through a mobile Web site. How I look forward to the day when I can use my voiceprint for more convenient authentication.

It’s almost like there’s a news blackout in the U.S., but today (November 3, 2011) marks a huge development in personal data sharing, at least in the UK. As reported here, the British Government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills formally launched a program called MiData. Its founding principle is that the personal data (and personally identifiable data) that utilities, banks, government agencies and others amass about individuals “should be released back” to them when requested in order to support more efficient e-commerce.

The UK government minister who is spearheading the effort tries to describe it in this video. As he mentions at the beginning, they make it sound quite “geeky,” but anyone who has tried to navigate the maze of false offers for a “free credit report” can readily understand how useful it might be for a credit reporting agency to make it a simple process to review the information that they hold about you and sell to others. Other examples include multiple power companies who are going to provide a way for customers to gain access to their historic use in a way that lets them do a bit of comparison shopping while deciding how to change their behaviors. Finally, they provide the example of Royal Bank of Scotland which, according to the BBC report, “is promising to give its customers ‘a complete walkthrough’ of all their annual transactions. So, for instance, you will be able to find out how much you spent at Tesco last year.”

In this government endorsed “partnership,” individuals (data sources), and multiple businesses engage in a form of “catch and release” (to use a fishing metaphor). The participating companies include competing utility companies: British Gas, EDF Energy, Scottish Power, Scottish Southern Energy, E.ON (a large, investor-owned gas and electric company based in Dusseldorf, Germany) and npower. The financial services companies include card issuers Visa and Mastercard, along with commercial banks, including Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland.

Rounding out the roster of 26 are firms that already offer tools and services that help individuals and businesses take better control of the data that individuals are generating. On the enterprise side are Avoco Secure and CallCredit. On the side of the individual are personal data storage specialist Mydex and data protection service provider, Garlik. There are also comparison shopping services addressing telco services (Billmonitor.com) and diversified financial, telco and personal services – moneysupermarket.com.

Rounding out the roster is a group of businesses and trade organizations that have a vested interest in both identity management and personal information management. The list includes the UK Cards Association, Three (3G wireless carrier) and, last but certainly not least, Google. With Eric Schmidt declaring Google+ an effort to transform the Web search giant into an “Identity Service,” this should not surprise anyone.

In addition to service providers and trade organizations, the UK government has enlisted participation from a number of regulators and advocacy groups. These include: Citizens Advice, Communications Consumer Panel, Consumer Focus, Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), OFCOM, Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and Which? (a membership organization that strongly resembles Consumers Union in the U.S.).

Kudos to the UK government for kicking off this initiative and good luck to all participating companies. MiData gives us all the opportunity to assess the value that individuals (be they existing customers, prospects or individuals “in the wild”) attach to the tools and resources that give them control over “what, when and how” they exchange data (identity, preferences, needs, wants) and “indications of intent” to the world at large.

In this post, the peripatetic promoter of cloud-based phone hacks, Twilio, encourages developers to come up with interesting new applications for the iPhone 4S, taking advantage of speech-based assistant, Siri.

Initiatives and contests like this one illustrate one more reason why Apple’s introduction of Siri is a signal event for mobile speech. The “application” (placed in quotes for reasons I will explain shortly) has its limits. In fact, it is not really an application in the traditional sense of the word. Like many of the downloadable “speech-enablers,” Siri defies categorization. There are “command and control” elements that fall in the category of “utility.” There are dictation and messaging components that make it a “communications” app. Finally, there are (or were) the links to 3rd party web sites that enabled Siri to transform the iPhone into a personal assistant.

The pros and cons of the speech-based mobile assistant were tossed around most recently when Google’s Andy Rubin dismissed the idea at an AsiaD (an All Things D conference). The gist of his criticism was that he’d “been-there-done-that-and-it-failed,” with reference to two speech-enabled personal digital assistants. One was General Magic, which was spun out of Apple Computer back in 1990 and had a few, high-visibility partnerships, including Sony, Motorola and AT&T among others.

In hindsight, Rubin may see General Magic as a failure but, in fact, its engineers designed and developed a new operating system (Magic Cap) and scripting language (Telescript) that were precursors VoiceXML and efforts to create tools that support agile programming for speech-based, conversational interfaces. The technologies that started in General Magic live on in the automated speech offerings of GM OnStar. And somewhere among the intellectual property vault owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures are General Magic’s patents, which were bought at auction in 2002.

Rubin also made mention of Wildfire Communications, Inc., a company founded by Rich Miner, who is now a partner at Google Ventures. But Wildfire’s experience is quite different from General Magic. Founded in 1991, Wildfire built a very loyal following for its speech-enabled services which, at the time, were largely built around management of voice and telephony functions, like voicemail management, call origination, call answering and the like. In 2002, France Telecom’s Orange Wireless bought the company for $147 million and offered the service to its mobile constituency.

At the time, the service was well-received by mobile customers but, because it was originally engineered as an enterprise app, Orange realized that it would have to re-engineer the underlying technology platform in order to offer the service in sufficient scale. Instead, the telco opted to shutter the service in 2005. As this article by Tim Richardson in The Register explains, shutting down the service took longer than anticipated because of the protests of a loyal following of Wildfire users who, to this day, feel like Orange was too hasty in its decision to cease the offering.

Siri (as an Apple initiative) shares quite a few of the attributes of both General Magic and Wildfire that attracted the attention and imagination of developers. The big difference today is that modern technology around computing power and storage support offering the service economically at scale. In addition, even without a formal API, the creative energy of 3rd party developers can be applied to enhancing the service using tools and scripting languages that have evolved into agile environments since the days of Magic Cap and Telescript.

Google has reason to be dismissive of Siri because it is important to call into question its ability to provide answers to questions that used to be the sole domain of the Google Search box (and therefore a source of advertising supported revenue for Google). But it can equally be argued that Voice Search and Voice Actions on the Android platform will benefit from general acceptance of speech-enabled assistants, like Siri. We have to see whether and when Apple introduces Siri as a downloadable app that runs on other devices and how well it (re)integrates the service with popular destination sites like Yelp!, OpenTable, Fandango, etc. Today Vlingo and Nuance’s DragonGo! have an advantage when supporting mobile ecommerce.

Greg Sterling and I will be issuing a report on “Mobile Speech Applications and Services” in the coming month. In it we will assess current initiatives and provide our insights and perspectives on the ultimate impact on local search and conversational commerce.

In December 2009, a company called Face It Corp. commissioned Opus Research to interpret results of a user survey designed to discover respondents attitudes toward a Web site and smartphone application that streamlines the process of contacting and interacting with their favorite businesses. The description of the application promised to “grab information you want or put you directly in touch with an operator at that company” without going through IVR systems or being kept on hold. It was a well-understood idea, thanks to initiatives by the likes of Lucyphone, Fonolo and Get2Human.

By September 2011, Face It was ready to come out from under the radar. Doing business as Hold-Free Networks, it experienced a highly successful launch at Demo Fall 2011. As CEO Lance Fried explained to us, the company followed a very structured launch cycle. We spent year one developing the software platform; year two launching the pilots and now, in year three, we’re live!” There are five pilots underway. They can’t be formally named yet but the company has been targeting airlines, insurance companies, financial institutions, technology companies and other companies whose high-volume contact centers are prone to putting inbound callers on hold or otherwise sending out the signal that “you’re call really isn’t that important to us.”

From Opus Research’s point of view, the application and platform offers significant elements of any large firm’s “mobile strategy” as well as initiatives to make customer care more conversational. It takes advantage of the data communications and processing features of a smartphone, tablet or other mobile devices to leverage the investment that firms have already made in information infrastructure that supports multi-channel contact centers which now embrace social media, inbound communications (toll-free, email, chat), outbound calling and social media. There are even plans to include biometric authentication (including voice biometrics) to provide strong authentication when a company needs assurance that the individual receiving an outbound call or alert is, indeed, the person whom the company intends to reach.

In addition to this advanced speaker verification, Hold-Free differentiates itself by providing a suite of services that major brands can offer that give greater degrees of control to their smartphone-toting clients. These include “intelligent call back,” giving a smartphone owner the ability to see when an agent or specialist will be available and scheduling a callback and “Secure Messaging” to deliver outbound messages or alerts according to an enterprise customer’s business rules.

Hold-Free’s offerings are “cloud-based.” Fees are charged based on usage on a “Software as a Service” basis. Sales efforts initially target large companies in North America. In addition to its selection for “launch” at Demo, Hold-Free earned the “Hottest in Show” award at the CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association) Enterprise & Applications Convention in San Diego last month.

After its acquisition of Sun Microsystems and the subsequent launch of “Cloud in a Box” (2010) and Exalytics (2011), analysts and competitors began to question Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s understanding of “Cloud Computing.” Well, today’s acquisition of RightNow Technologies shows a deep appreciation of the power of cloud-based resources to provide a better “user experience,” especially in customer service settings. RightNow was founded in 1997 and has been experiencing unprecedented growth of late as enterprises discover the power of its concept of a customer experience cloud.

The union with Oracle will provide more global resources for RightNow (based in Bozeman, MT) to expand geographically. As part of Oracle’s formidable roster of resources in database management, CRM and enterprise-wide collaboration, the foundation for better engagement models for marketing, customer care, sales and support are all within Oracle’s reach. I, personally, thought some deeper relationship with Interactive Intelligence was in the works. Now I wonder whether it will all happen under Oracle’s nameplate.