Lightbulbs are turning on all over the blogosphere and soon will provide sufficient illumination of a long-standing issue that will shape mobile access to social networks, financial institutions and corporate mail and message stores. This is an especially important development now that there is a clear path from locked-down, premises-based computing and collaboration resources into shared servers and “virtualized” computing environments “in the cloud.”

AT&T Labs is taking a leadership role in promoting anonymous authentication. As illustrated in a diagram in this article by Brian Oliver Bennett in “Laptop”, the architecture underlying Watson, its core automated speech processing platform, puts speaker verification on the same level as such core capabilities as speech recognition, text-to-speech (TTS) rendering, natural language understanding (NLU) and advanced dialog management.

Laptop’s Bennett was especially interested in SAFE (Secure Authentication For Everyone) and its potential to protect mobile users as they use laptops and mobile devices to carry out their favorite online activities, like social networking or accessing personal information. As he explains:

Most interesting though is AT&T’s Safe (Strong Authentication For Everyone) security protocol. It uses four factors for authentication; voice, account info, validated mobile device, and location. The good news is these protocols are envisioned to operate behind the scenes to enable faster, more convenient account protection and login.

The video in this Gizmodo post (though noisy and a bit hard to follow) provides a solid usecase for voice based authentication for both laptop and mobile subscribers using Facebook. Anyone who has had his or her FB account compromised will immediately appreciate the value of a service that authenticates the user (not just a recognized device, browser or client).

Another little appreciated but fundamentally important aspect of voice biometric-based authentication is its support of anonymous validation. On services like Facebook or any social network where a user might benefit from using an alias (think “Fake Steve Jobs”), such pseudonym users find great benefit in a resource that can assure them that makes sure that impostors will be thwarted, should they try to obtain access under false pretenses. In this case, the system doesn’t care about revealing who you are, but can ensure others (your readers or the people with whom you want to carry out business) that you are who you claim to be.

Anonymous authentication is at the heart of supporting electronic commerce and will play an increasingly important role on the mobile internet. This fact is recognized by members of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as they codify the standards that underlie future Web- and cloud-based services. Note this post by W3C Team Member Dave Raggett in which he notes that he is working on a method of anonymous credentialing, which he equates to a student ID card and cites the usecase where a university student need only “prove you are a current student, but not for your actual identity.”

Raggett says that he is working with personnel at IBM’s lab in Zurich to develop an extension to Firefox that supports “zero knowledge proof” of identity. As described, it would use a PIN or passphrase, but – as the video mentioned above indicates – that phrase (or series of random digits) can be spoken, rather than keyed, into the system to prevent false accepts and temper false rejects as well.

Raised awareness of mutifactor, anonymous authentication among application developers, standards makers and major brands (like AT&T and IBM) hold the promise of accelerating introduction of marketable products within realistic planning horizons. Associating anonymous authentication with the globally accepted (and fundamentally insecure) social networks should be a relatively near term boon to real world use.

The way that AT&T is working with the venture community (and vice versa) is what is bound to attract attention. According to the report in Bloomberg/BusienssWeek both Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers will be in attendance, prepared to invest in promising application developers. AT&T does not plan to take an equity position in any contestant, but plans to benefit from their delivery of apps that further popularize devices that run Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android. Donovan cited the figures that Gartner issued last December, forecasting $6.7 billion to be spent on wireless applications in 2010. Greg Sterling discussed the validity of this assessment here.

The reality TV show, “Who Wants to be a Wireless App Developer?” cannot be far behind.

I was pleasantly surprised by the approach to incorporating speech into multi-modal and mobile applications that appears to be taking hold among the category leaders (like Google, AT&T, Microsoft and Nuance) as well as specialists like Novauris, Ditech, Voxeo, Siri and IfbyPhone. If there were a single take-away from the Mobile Voice conference, it is that long-time specialists in building the ideal voice user interface (VUI) have put a lot of thought and investment into promoting a results-oriented user experience, that takes into account multiple devices, modalities and media.

As Mike Cohen of Google discussed in his opening keynote, Google wants to make it clear that “whenever that keyboard pops up on a mobile device, users should know that they can also use their voice for input.” But voice is but one of many alternatives. A number of spokespeople from Nuance reinforced the message, making it clear that – although the company is widely regarded as the developer or acquire of a multiplicity of speech recognition and text-to-speech resources – the company built a number of solutions that use “predictive technologies” and visual output to speed up the processes involved in helping mobile subscribers carry out a number of activities successfully regardless of handset configuration or network used. As Amy Livingstone, Sr. Director of Enterprise Marketing explained, the company is positioning for 4G (and even 5G), which will entail “ubiquity, high speed, real-time video, co-browsing and mobile Web applications”; not just a voice user interface.

AT&T’s Jay Wilpon showcased another very important aspect of a strategy to accelerate development of multi-modal, frequently used apps. Last September, his company has bought a firm called Plusmo to bring in-house a software platform that will enable its community of developers to use high-level languages to create multi-modal applications that work across a number of mobile OSes and “mobile platforms.” It also established the first of many planned “innovation labs” in Atlanta and has launched a formal program to encourage thousands of third party developers to take advantage of its resources and reach a wide variety of mobile users. Wilpon explained that “mobile devices are the white space for speech,” yet “nobody has made a penny of profit on speech engines”, rather “its the applications!”

It’s clear that AT&T will not be alone in encouraging participation from a broader spectrum of application developers to provide solutions that include speech. What I find so encouraging is that the new generation of solutions developers are comfortable building applications that include speech *where appropriate* for input, output or both. But they are by no means IVR script writers or old-guard telephony experts. They know Web services and standards and they enjoy “gaming the IP-telephony cloud.” It’s their collective energy, imagination and expertise that are making the coming months and years so rich with new applications and possibilities.

On the side of sunlight and open-ness, the City and County of San Francisco leveraged the efforts of many other cities, developers and non-profit organization to publish an “open API” for its 311-based non-emergency services hotline. This is Recombinant Communications at its best. A well-understood access technology (the venerable three-digit short code) is being deployed to offer more public service-oriented applications and to offload traffic from the over-burdened 911 emergency line. It will emerge as a channel for better “eGovernment” in an era when budget cuts spell reduced staffing and long lines at public offices.

Meanwhile, market forces have convinced AT&T Mobility (a) that it needs to have at least one Android device on the shelves of its retail stores but (b) it regards Google as a competitor whose products can only be offered within designated territories. That’s why Yahoo!, not Google, is the default search engine on the Backflip and why it is technically impossible for subscribers for shop around and personalize their devices with applications of their choice.

AT&T’s customers are short-changed by this short-sighted policy. Today, such heresy against open-ness and Recombinant Communications is part of an inside game and goes largely unnoticed. But the battle for share and survival among “mobile platform providers” (referring to the mobile OS and application delivery environments, like iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows 7…) is heavily influenced by the policies and practices of mobile carriers. AT&T’s conditional support of Android is destined to be regarded as cynical, ineffective and, in the long-run, it is not sustainable.

AT&T Mobility is doing its part to cast a sharp light on the problem. It has launched a nationwide campaign of public service announcements desigend “to raise awareness about the risks of texting and driving and remind all wireless consumers, especially youth, that text messages can – and should – wait until after driving.” Advertising initiatives are largely ineffective, unless accompanied by some other form of restraint or constraint. A White Paper published by ZoomSafer notes that, at any moment in time, over 810,000 autos are being driven by people who are actively using their cellular phone. This is the sad case, in spite of the fact that texting while driving is banned in a total of 21 states or territories.

ZoomSafer is a solution provider that has developed and markets software that enables its users (both corporate and personal) to define and manage policies that govern the use of mobile devices or, as CEO and Founder Matt Howard put it, “promote safe and legal use of cell phones while driving.” The solution is comprised of three parts. A Web site enables users to identify the policies that they wish to enforce (for example, to prohibit reception or origination of text messages or phone calls when the device is moving faster than 10 mph). Client software on the handset detects speed and “enforces” the designated policies. Finally, and this is the “speechable moment” aspect of the solution, ZoomSafer and Irish voice application service provider Dial2Do offer a service called “Voice Mate”, provides single-button control of TTS-based reading of emails or texts as well as dictation of replies, email or texts.

At the the theme of AT&T’s national campaign is “No text is worth dying for,” and its tagline is ““Txtng & Drivng … It Can Wait.” The carrier also uses this Facebook page to encourage users to take the pledge not to text while driving.

I see ZoomSafer picking up where such pledges leave off. The company sees three distinct market segments: Teens (or rather their parents), “pro-sumers” (meaning mobile professionals) and corporations. For $2.99 each month, it gives subscribers the ability to define and enforce their own policies against distracted driving. The addition of Voice Mate brings the monthly rate to $5.99. In addition, $10 per handset per month is the charge for Corporate customers to manage, enforce and audit their policies.

“Policy Enforcement”, meaning keeping people true to their stated intentions, is the crux of ZoomSafer’s value proposition. The economic benefit arises from loss reduction, lawsuit avoidance and abidance to existing laws. However, for those to whom communications deferred is communications denied, the delivery of voice renderings of text and the spoken origination of email or texts will turn out to be a bargain at an incremental $3 per month. Combining speech-enabled services with broader service offerings is destined to be the norm.

It was a move that, among other objectives, aimed to please FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who is also quoted in TWICE, commending “Apple’s decision to open its platform to 3G calling, an action that will create new opportunities for entrepreneurs and provide more choices for consumers.” The immediate beneficiary is Connecticut-based iCall, which has added “free phone calls” from the iPhone to a roster of free or low-cost voice calls using PCs running specified versions of Windows, Linux or MacOS.

According to reports Fring has already joined iCall in the AppStore, while Skype says its app is ready but waiting for a few tests and modifications to be complete. The move dramatizes the opportunities presented by iPhone while, at the same time showcasing how opportunities can be created or destroyed at the whim of Apple’s policymakers. At this point, just a few days after Google launched its Web-based access to Google Voice features, there is no turning back, and charging forward means that new features and functions are bound to augment vanilla, free long-distance.

To maintain its leadership the company is engaged in a number of initiatives that can only be called transformative. While it has always been a master of manipulating public policy, its lobbyists have gone the extra mile (or perhaps the “last mile”) in the past week by filing these comments proposing that the FCC develop guidelines for killing off POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) and shutting down the copper-based PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network).

On the surface, the proposal has a certain amount of internal logic. As AT&T’s lawyers explain, it is losing residential customers at an accelerating rate and, as a result, it has to raise the rates it charges remaining residential customers in order to maintain acceptable profitability. Only a monopoly sees the necessity to raise prices in the face of declining demand; and it is very easy to interpret AT&T’s pricing policy as an effort to accelerate the demise of the PSTN. Citing the FCC’s “successes” in coordinating broadcast TV’s transition to digital signals and in helping mobile carriers move from the first generation AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone Service) to PCS and then digital PCS, it is asking for the Commission to oversee the process of establishing a date-certain for abandoning the existing phone network so that it can dedicate its resources exclusively to extending broadband links to the Internet to 100% of the nation.

As Bruce Kushnick of New Networks Institute points out here, this is a false choice and a spurious argument. There are not “two networks”, there is only one utility and, over the years AT&T and its cohort of common carriers (primarily Verizon) has been compensated for operating its networks at rates that took into account improvements and upgrades – including special funds to extend broadband to every home and business in America.

In a particular telling section of TeleTruth’s memorandum, Kushnick provides the following “reality check:

AT&T, right now has 1.7 million total U-Verse, broadband-TV capable households (AT&T 3rd/q2009). That’s it! They claimed they would have 18 million by 2007 (not counting BellSouth). AT&T now controls 22 states. If AT&T is going to walk away from the utility networks and we leave it up to AT&T to build out their ‘broadband networks’ —one-half of the US is going to be harmed.

So that’s where we’re at in Washington, DC. Policy makers have declared that it is in the national interest to extend broadband access to all the homes in the U.S. Only AT&T has proposed that the best way to do it is to walk away from its existing physical plant in favor of a yet-to-be-constructed resource. In its filing it invites interested parties to comment on the approach. I urge everyone to take an interest.

I called this “Part 1″ of our discussion of AT&T in the Age of Ma Google because managing regulators is only part of AT&T’s initiatives in this age of Ma Google and Recombinant Communication. Later today I’ll be issuing an advisory on the many initiatives launched by AT&T at CES, including support of multiple mobile operating systems, developer environments and application distribution platforms announced at the AT&T Developer Summit. It is there that AT&T showed its capacity to support Recombinant Communications development efforts.

This is something of a coup for Nuance in a hotly contested marketplace that spans the fully-automated service integrated into Google Voice to the various levels of human assisted services from DiTech Network’s PhoneTag and SpinVox, in addition to Nuance.

Back in September AT&T made an equity investment in Vlingo which might have given that speech-to-text specialist an inside track on transcription. However, Vlingo has applied its expertise toward spoken input for mobile applications – including search, text messaging and voice commands, and has not invested specifically in voicemail transcription and delivery.

I have been trialing Nuance’s Voicemail to Text for several months, and have it configured to deliver transcribed messages as email with the media file attached. I can attest to the fact that the quality of transcription is accurate enough to make it quite valuable for me. The service will now benefit from tighter integration with AT&T Mobility’s other enhanced messaging features and functions including delivery of the messages as SMS text.

Carriers have an important role to play in promoting speech-enabled services to mobile subscribers. Thus far they have been a promiscuous bunch, hedging their bets among providers of voice dialing, voice search, dictation and command. This multi-layered approach will prevail for the foreseeable future as mobile subscribers will ultimately vote with their pocketbooks to determine which services and pricing methodologies make the most sense (or cents) in the long run.

Given that Google Voice was poised to open up its service to more users this quarter, the two actions are probably not related. It is more closely related to the recently announced partnership with Verizon Wireless, which promises to use the Google search box on Android-based handsets to provide direct access to Google applications and features. The success of such a tactic requires Google to do its best to enlist more handset owners to configure their Google Voice preferences from their desktops or laptops.

No wonder AT&T is so touchy.

Renewed interest by AT&T’s in speech recognition serves as a bellwether for anticipated revenue growth and marketing activity surrounding mobile speech on a global basis. In a recent conversation Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan asserted that mobile speech adoption has hit an inflection point. Apparently AT&T agreed. In a not-so-veiled swipe at IBM and Nuance, Grannan asserts in a press release that, Vlingo has “seen significant accuracy and performance gains with Watson compared to other core speech technologies that will allow us to create a dramatically improved user experience.”

In fact, Vlingo told us that it reached the 2 million user mark based on the accuracy and automation rates attainable with its current recognition engine, licensed from IBM. We do not have a “lab” here at I2Go but have been told that the today’s recognition engines from Nuance, IBM, AT&T Watson, Novauris and Microsoft can all be tuned to reach accuracy rates in the 90% range in the field. This is a marked improvement from the 40% or less achieved with early services. Because accuracy can never reach 100%, the next step in marketing and service development will be to start managing user expectation so that failure to recognize that one word out of 10 is not the equivalent of a PC’s “blue screen of death.”

Over the years, Vlingo has made great strides in promoting a mobile voice user interface and defining distribution plans and pricing strategies. On the Blackberry, for instance, it offers a free version that supports Twitter updates, Web-based search and voice dialing and also offers a premium version ($17.99) to add text messaging and email origination. AT&T’s renewed interest in mobile speech provides some market validation and portends heightened competition among a set of well-heeled leaders (Nuance/IBM, Microsoft/Tellme, Google) and a group of service-oriented innovators that includes Vlingo (now with AT&T), Novauris, Yap, Ditech Networks (with Simulscribe) and a couple dozen others.