Some speech app developers have piled by noting that the service should do more “on the device.” It is crippled when the data link to the server is down (which happens quite a bit over AT&T’s network – at least in SF). I would also note that Apple made no friends by discontinuing the Siri App for those (like me) who have it on their plain vanilla iPhone 4s with several more months on their contracts.

Sight unseen, I take the attitude that this is the reason Siri made the transition from approved app in the iTunes store to “beta” version of a native feature (meaning it ships pre-loaded and accessible through the “Home” button).

I take the attitude that this rendition of Siri is the worst one that the general public will encounter and that it can only get better. This started me thinking of computer graphics for the movies. Anyone who saw the first Star Wars was totally “wow’d!” and had little idea how much better it would get. Meanwhile, the producers of the film were already seeing all its faults and telling themselves that they were spending too much time on the stupid stuff like making sure that the strings holding up models of starfighters.

Even in the days of Pixar, they are ever-improving computer generated images in subtle ways that make for a better viewer experience. The animators of the first “Toy Story” told themselves that “this is the worst looking movie we will ever make.” And so it was.

We should weather the criticism of “SIRIously sucking” that I’ve seen. We can only hope that the data link between device and server gets more consistent because the marriage of AI and speech rec that is required to provide a consistently successful user experience depends on it. And we need a better way for the app to work when the data link is down.

I’m pretty sure that Apple and the Siri folks are already addressing these issues.

As illustrated in the YouTube video below, Jawbone Thoughts is positioned as an alternative to voicemail, a service that is taking a beating as first generation systems reach their end-of-life and both companies and carriers are finding it hard to justify an upgrade. It is also called”better than texting” because audio feeds can convey emotion (and perhaps even irony).

Here’s the demo:

This demo shows a use case whereby all of the recipients have the app and can listen, interrupt and exchange voice messages in near real time. In that respect it has some of the feel of RebelVox, in that it supports asynchronous conversations. It lacks RebelVox’s ability to “catch up” with the live experience.

Recipients who don’t have the app will receive text messages with an embedded link to a Web site that plays the message for them. As described in its press release, recipients can also opt to have the audio message transcribed, a task accomplished by technology partner Yap/ The first ten transcriptions are free. After that bundles of transcriptions can be bought within the app. An additional 25 will cost $0.99 (about 4 cents each) or a bundles of 100 cost $2.99 (about 3 cents each).

As to why a company that is ostensibly into selling wireless headsets and speakers is getting into the messaging apps business, the service will be integrated with Aliph’s Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset so that it can be configured to perform autodialing and messaging combined as part of the MyTalk Dial App.

Todd demonstrates the SCIDs concept in this video:

Note that the embedded title for this YouTube video is “Truly Hands Free Trigger.wmv”. That’s because Sensory is now shipping Speech Trigger SDKs (software development kits) for mobile devices running either Apple’s iOS4 or the Android operating system. Vlingo, for one, has taken full advantage of the SDK and introduced a hands-free services called Vlingo InCar. As illustrated in the video below, the “trigger” occurs when a driver says “Hey Vlingo”. Then, in response to the prompt “What’s shakin’?” drivers can here the contents of a text message, reply, originate other messages and search for a local business to get spoken directions.

The service is optimized for the Android 2.2 operating system (“Foyo”) and uses Bluetooth for connectivity. Users of the existing Vlingo app, can also originate tweets, update status on Facebook, open and control 3rd party applications and the other activities that Vlingo supports. After a two week “beta” when the service was available only to Spring subscribers, Vlingo expanded to “all Android users” on October 19.

For those of you keeping track at home, the announcement of Vlingo InCar and the release of the “Trigger SDK” was almost simultaneous with the launch of StartTalking from
a Boston-based technology venture called AdelaVoice. As you can see in the video below, AdelaVoice laid claim to being the first and only mobile application that provides a hands-free, eyes-on-the-road way to send and receive text messages. It is a well-understood problem and one that is attracting significant investment dollars, as carriers and application providers work to support safe spoken input of text.

StartTalking Overview

Todd Mozer tells me that the same firmware that supports “trigger words” is being used in high-end, Bluetooth based earpieces from Plantronics to support a hands-free “answer or ignore” function for treating incoming calls. The phone can grab Caller ID information, render it as speech and then prompt the driver to react with “You can say ‘answer’ or ‘ignore’.” It’s brilliantly simple, and much safer than looking around and reaching down to find the phone. In both cases, the objective of the firmware is to provide the most pleasant and efficient user experience possible.

From a usability perspective, app designers have made the “Push to Talk” button more prominent once you have entered a “conversation”. As always, you can start it much like listening to a voice message, but you can speed up the replay by pressing a “rabbit” icon and, in essence, catch up to real time. From that point on, as the promotion will go, it’s like “IM for your voice”.

Targeting the growing ranks of iPhone and iPad users, PerSay has announced that its VocalPassword functionality has been modified to allow app developers to include voice authentication with “minimal resources.” By adding voice biometrics to traditional methods of authentication, including login IDs and passwords, the new capability enables a multi-factor authentication.

The additional layer of security can provide app users with a “sleek and innovate authentication experience,” says Almog Aley-Raz, CEO of PerSay in the press release. The company is touting the solution for applications such as mobile banking, social networks, payment services and membership clubs.

PerSay is not alone in developing a voice biometric solution for iPhone. VoiceSafe, created by Voice Trust, is an application to securely store personal information on an iPhone. As well, Palo Alto, CA-based SecuriMobile offers a platform to manage large deployments of voice biometric-enabled mobile phones with support for BlackBerry, iPhone, Android smartphones.

Conversely, looking at spoken output, the patent filing describes “speakable strings” which are employed to provide audio feedback associated with the media that is being displayed or played.

The patent filing is clearly a product of inventors in Apple’s labs, so the concepts are presented at a fairly high level. Still it shows how thoughtfully speech will be baked into Apple’s audio user interface.

This “Tap for an Agent” function is now extended to iPhone users, who start by selecting the companies they want to call, scroll through a visual presentation of the menu tree, tap their screens to designate a point-of-entry and then carry out their normal activities until fonolo puts them in touch with the customer service agent. It’s not necessarily a time-saver. For instance, callers seeking United Airlines agents at the height of so-called “Snowmageddon” and its unavoidable flight delays and cancellations were told that wait times for an agent were over an hour.

Like Lucyphone and Virtual Hold, Fonolo frees people from spending time off-hook while waiting to talk with a live person. Yet all three are treating the symptoms of a broken customer care infrastructure, not the root causes. This is an age when Google, which is most commonly thought of as a “search” company, is moving fast and furiously to add new services by launching the social features of “Buzz”, announcing a new Fiber-to-the-Home initiative, purchasing Aardvark.com and underwriting free WiFi in the The Dalles, OR, where it has built its uber-data center (thanks to a long-term contract with the municipally owned power company)… all in quick succession.

Google, for one, recognizes that “points of contact” span search, email, phone calls, social sites and all manner of activity. A call to a contact center comes near the end of a succession of interactions with friends, influencers, serendipitous information sources and other components of a global decision engine. Contacting a live agent is the culminating act aimed to bring closure to a trouble report or the effort to by a new product or service. Fonolo’s app takes some of the pain and discomfort out of reaching the ultimate goal (to talk to a live agent), but Google (and a small list of large X-as-a-Service companies who aim to compete with Google) are in the position to understand the context of each call, anticipate its purpose and ultimately provide better service.

With an understanding that the real goal is to re-tool and re-invent the whole customer-vendor relationship, we can recognize that the problem spans mobile, social, search, ecommerce and ultimately “cloud computing.” Fonolo’s “Tap for an Agent” is a neat trick and deserves recognition as a solution to the hold-time dilemma that leads customers to conclude that their time, ultimately, is not important to a business.

Yet, in the larger picture, 2010 feels like the year during which technologies are put into practice that do more than overcome such speed-bumps and daily annoyances to bring the full potential of Web services, identity management and robust telephony to put more power in the hands or, more accurately, handsets of customers as they rely on a very dynamic mix of of phones, computers and face-to-face interactions to out their daily commerce.

[By the Way: Voxeo's Dan York and I will be discussing findings from our recent survey of the attitudes and usage patterns surrounding this sort of "multichannel customer care" in a live Webcast, Thursday, February 18th, 1 p.m. EST/10 a.m. PST. Click this link to learn more and register for the event.]

Siri is set apart because it applies the depth of knowledge its founders and software specialists have built at SRI and elsewhere in creating a “cognitive assistant that learns and organizes” (CALO). Siri users benefit from a voluminous amount of pre-preprocessing and organization of information that has been carried out “in the cloud” on their behalf.

The image above illustrates Siri’s landing page. The illustrated topic areas serve as reminders of the sort of often-asked-for information which the service is tuned to handle. It also suggests phrases that users might try to get the information they want. Note that the suggestion below “Movies” is “PG-13 movies this afternoon”, illustrating that the “artificial intelligence” ingrained in the service is quite capable of knowing a movies rating and the meaning of “this afternoon” as well as the physical location of the originating user. And, given the precepts of CALO, responses get more accurate and useful as the system acquires more usage history.

I’ve had the service for a couple of days and here are my initial reactions. My overall experience has been quite positive. The quality of voice recognition (powered by the same “engine” that supports Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search on the iPhone) is quite good. It has been accurate both indoors and out. More importantly, the results are illustrated in a large white box for editing before submision. This form of spoken “utterance triage” is a must for speech enabled applications and will ultimately give users a chance to correct punctuation and capitalization, in addition to spelling.

Response time could feel a bit draggy (the general public hates latencies); but, on the positive side, the answers were qualitatively different from those of a general search engine (like the voice-activated Google app for the iPhone). Put simply, the service is more “domain aware.” It recognizes the differences in intent when a query is about a Taxi versus a movie and responds accordingly. The request for a “taxi service” is a great example. Google serves up links to various local taxi cab services in the area, including the phone numbers and a means to get directions.

Siri, by contrast, assumes that you want a taxi immediately and serves up a form, using Taxi Magic (powered by RideCharge), to book a ride, based on your location and a specified time. Before delivering the form, however, Siri serves up a number of comic book like dialog balloons with statements in plain English to tell you how it is processing your request. For example it might say “I found these taxis within walking distance” or suggest another way to interpret your utterance: “Get me a cab”, for instance.

In each of the chosen categories, the search engine is designed to accelerate the process of search and decisionmaking that culminates in a purchas or transaction. The company’s financial success will be predicated on supporting multiple transactions and taking a percentage fof the revenue generated. That’s another big difference between Google Voice Search and Siri.

Based on my experience, I encourage people to download and gain experience with Siri, just as it gains experience with you.

For background, CDW’s Scheckel explained that his company, with 6,500 employees in 23 locations, had already been instrumental in 3,500 UC deployments (primarily in the U.S., but also “around the world”. Admittedly, not all of those implementations can be considered “mobile UC”, yet it is clear that virtually all of CDW’s customers and prospects are coming to grips with the reality that their employees are using their mobile phones to carry out their daily business.

In the past, Scheckel observed that IT decisionmakers may have put off the pursuit of a “fixed to mobile” solution as they tackled larger, transformative events such as mergers, PBX elimination, contact center consolidation or general “virtualization” of both IT and customer care resources. Today, things are different. At a minimum, employees are accessing email on their mobile devices. Many have had their eyes open to the potential of a “smartphone” to run multiple applications linked to the company’s CRM system, “presence” indicators or conferencing. The IT department or other keepers of the keys to business policy and procedures are looking for an easy way to embrace new, mobile platforms.

For its part, Laurent Philonenko says the company has been offering an iPhone application for free through the iTunes AppStore for almost a year. If it is there, it is not easy to find. A search for iPhone apps from Cisco Systems yielded two hits, but one is an “internet speed tester” utility and the other is a videogame called Cisco Edge Quest 2. That said, I had seen demos of the existing Cisco UC Mobility application (which is the client-side instantiation of applications which require enterprises to own and operate a Cisco Unified Mobility Advantage Server) and can attest to its core value, which is providing the IT department (and keepers of business rules and processses) with a secure, proven mechanism for extending advanced call routing, presence management, visual voice mai and directory features to mobile phones.

The new version will add Voice over WiFi, a feature called “shake-to-lock” which enables iPhone users to lock their phones with a simple shaking gesture, and another feature called “call preservation” which ensures that a user doesn’t drop a call when “going outside the application” to search a directory or check a calendar item. Voice dialing is also on the product roadmap (though it is not expected to be in the version released in April.

While the iPhone is the showcase for the new features, Cisco will have more mobile applications for the RIM Blackberry and Nokia E-series phones. Android will also be supported (although they have not seen a lot of Androids in enterprise IT fabrics), with qualified support of Microsoft Phone (Windows Mobile), should it re-establish itself as a contender. The iPhone is supported with a downloadable app that uses Java to render the keyboard and carry out instructions. We an also anticipate support of browser-based rendering of phone apps using HTML5 (much like the recently introduced Google Voice offering). This dual approach would extend Cisco’s reach across the entire community of smartphones running standard browsers.

In effect, Cisco and its master distributors like CDW are removing many barriers to enterprise acceptance of mobile phones. So called “Fixed to Mobile” transitions are less about purchasing new servers and hardware access points and more about downloadable software or browser-based communications. The market is certainly ready. Lower CapEx and reduced complexity make this a very timely offer.

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.