As speech geeks (like me) know, such an uncontrolled experiment is basically unfair. In these cases, the noise created as one phone presents an audio response to a spoken question is destined to confound the other device’s ability to carry out its task. But even if the Windows Phone 7 running Tellme failed to perform tasks with the same proficiency as Siri, just sharing the screen with the iPhone 4S was a marketing coup. It also set the stage for a set of product announcements that are destined to make Tellme and Speech at Microsoft top of mind during the holiday buying season.

This graphic from Microsoft’s Image Gallery illustrates how people can use their voices, in conjunction with an xBox 360, Kinect motion detection and Bing Search, to take command and navigate the growing variety of content offered through TV screens. The library or database of streamed content includes xBox 360 games as well as an online catalog of movies, sports events, television shows and music. Its current roster of contet providers/distributors include Hulu Plus, Last.fm, Netflix, Zune music and video and ESPN®. This content is offered through the broadband transport resources of AT&T U-verse® TV in the U.S., TELUS in Canada, BSkyB in the U.K., CANAL+ in France, Vodafone Portugal, VimpelCom in Russia and FOXTEL in Australia.

The full roster of TV and streamed fare is included in this press release, along with a timetable for roll-out of additional content and distributors in 2012, including Comcast’s Xfinity On Demand channels. All told, “nearly 40″ TV and entertainment providers joined in the October launch announcement and will now be part of “customized, voice-controlled experiences to Xbox 360 systems.”

Microsoft is promoting voice command of the xBox in TV commercials and multiple advertising campaigns. It already claims 35 million members of xBox Live and has found that a significant percentage of them are already comfortable carrying out conversational interactions with other xBox Live members (as part of multiplayer games). Commanding to the console to find specific songs, programs, sports events or other entertainment is starting to feel more and more natural. Voice command for remote control TV has lured the likes of Promptu and Google into ill-fated initiatives, but Microsoft Kinect users have already had positive experience using both voice and gestures to command xBox games. Navigating and interacting with a broader set of content types and sources should be a natural. It should be much easier than scrolling through a video guide with hundreds of channels and a near infinite number of time slots.

For iPhone 4S users, Siri defines the new mobile user interface. It integrates automated speech recognition with resources for natural language understanding and supports a “short list” of common, mobile use cases. Its most prominent competitors for this role are Vlingo, Google Voice Action and more than a dozen mobile voice interface providers.

xBox Kinect will find that the mix of utility and entertainment ingrained in Tellme (along with Bing Search) has a chance to define the set of voice-enabled living room applications. Google will be there as well along with Apple, Logitech and a handful of others. Collectively, their efforts are making 2011-2012 to be the year that the voice user interface becomes acceptable for a multiplicity of “mainstream” activities.

This lesson was driven home most recently when Nuance Communications acquired Swype, Inc., a small, company whose single product is software makes it simpler and faster to use your finger (or a stylus?) to enter text on a smartphone. According to this SEC filing and this comment by my associate Greg Sterling on Internet2Go, Nuance is committing something on the order of $100 million to merge Swype into its operations, presumably to add Swype capabilities to its Flex T9 interface.

In his post, Greg questions why Nuance needs to buy Swype, even as Flex T9 already outperforms Swype in some respects. He presents a list of possible answers to his question, including what I would call “the three P’s,” patents, positioning and personnel. But I would add a fourth: “Packaging.” Swype’s market proposition was simplicity itself: “Swype is a faster and easier way to input text on any screen.” That’s it. And it won over a following.

As for Nuance, it is following its time-tested modus operandi for constant improvement and refinement through acquisition. It’s been doing to bring specific refinements to its product portfolio automated speech processing – including voice biometrics, directory assistance/auto-attendant, text-to-speech rendering, dictation, medical transcription and other domains that benefit from solving specific problems. The core T9 technology came with the acquisition of Tegic from AOL-Time Warner in 2007 for $247 million. At the time I called it part of Nuance’s “Pay It Forward” strategy of constantly improving a mobile subscriber’s ability to take control of his or her device and the services provided through it.

For Nuance, it adds to its portfolio of technologies that support highly personalized mobile services. For Swype, it provides a windfall, liquidity event that satisfies its founders and investors. For those of us into pattern recognition, this acquisition is similar to the one that brought GroupMe – a year-and-a-half old, single-product company – into Microsoft/Skype’s pantheon of products and services. A journalist at the International Business Times-Australia accurately referred to GroupMe as “a super-small, zero-revenue tech company founded only last year at the Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon.”

So why did GroupMe fetch a multi-million price (rumored to be between $65 and $78 million) from Microsoft? The resemblance to the Nuance/Swype deal is striking. First, GroupMe solves a known problem confronted by millions of mobile users as they try to form small groups on the fly. Or as GroupMe puts it on its Home Page: “Group Messaging from Any Phone.” Second, it’s not an “app,” it’s part of the user interface. It can be generalized across multiple modes and media. As we’ve learned with Google+ and, with some difficulty on Facebook or LinkedIn, we humans benefit from group-forming utilities. GroupMe’s core product may be the result of a mere eight hours at a TechCrunch Hackathon (using Twilio’s tools on Amazon Web Services EC2, incidentally) but it fulfilled a recognized Gap in Skype’s mobile user interface.

The acquisition enhances the Microsoft/Skype e-services genome. It’s a grand slam home run for GroupMe. From the mobile subscriber’s point of view, it improves his or her ability to take control of their device and the services it offers. See the pattern?

The scientists affiliated with the Speech at Microsoft Group upped the speech applications ante this year when they posted this story on the Microsoft Research blog. For years, we’ve been hearing that the automated speech processing is on the cusp of a quantum leap in “accuracy,” in terms of recognizing utterances and understanding language. This post makes it clear that neural networking plays an important part in adding height to the big leap forward.

As always, the ideal solutions are “out-of-the-box, speaker-independent speech-recognition services” provided by a system that requires no training and works well for all users under all conditions. Certainly advances in acoustic processing and directional microphones will play a part. But Interspeech is the place where speech science is showcased and the relevant three-letter abbreviation is DNN (for “deep neural networking.”

Past solutions had been based on capturing utterances as “phonemes” and subjecting them to interpretation using so-called “context-dependent Gaussian mixture model HMMs (CD-GMM-HMMs).” Dong Yu, a researcher at Microsoft’s speech labs in Redmond, Washington, observes that the use of DNN in conjunction with smaller components (or “building blocks”) of spoken utterances called “senomes.” In short, today’s computing platforms can apply a new technique (DNN) to understand what is being said by looking at incredibly small pieces of spoken material.

Microsoft’s team delivered their paper at Interspeech today (August 29, 2011).

Hawaii is a set of enabling technologies bringing the prospects for speech recognition, optical character recognition or augmented reality into the mobile application mix. For those who have not seen Windows Phone 7, its mobile user interface starts with “Live Tiles.” Instead of static icons that invoke separate applications, Live Tiles illustrate dynamic data. The “messaging” app will show the number of “new” messages from the home page, of course, but the news app may show scrolling news, social networks can show status changes of friends and on and on. Thus dramatizing how mobile apps morph into hybrid apps that combine programs or applications on the device with both executables and data residing in the cloud.

The first apps for Hawaii, for instance, a “Relay Service” and a “Rendezvous Service” enable and leverage apps ability to communicate with one another to keep the information fresh and lively. These are attributes that mobile subscribers come to expect as the phone’s role as a highly personal tool for every day life becomes more prominent – given that the phones know where you are, where you’re supposed to be (given that it has calendar info), who you talk to (call records), who you may talk to (in a contact list) and is continuously updated and increasingly personal. Not all of this can (or should) reside on the Web.

The announcement served the god of product continuity while fulfilling on the promises of platform agnosticism (supporting both Cisco ICM and Genesys, for instance) and constantly expanding features and capability. Existing Aspect customers will be pleased to find that the new products and services are organized into Aspect’s customary lines of business, including a voice portal platform that supports inbound, outbound and blended interactions; workforce optimization; and the very popular collections and “streamlined collections” applications. Aspect IP 7 adds support of IM, email and chat (all under the purview of the Workforce Management resources), making it a single platform for inbound, outbound, chat, Email, SMS, IM and IVR, as well as quality and workflow management.

In a conference call last week Aspect executives, including Gary Barnett and Serge Hyppolite laid claim to some capabilities that distance Aspect from its competitors. The UC applications that were showcased include: “Seamless Customer Service, which starts with a Voice Portal but transfers calls based on rules supported by its “Ask an Expert” routine, including the ability to connect to the agent with whom the caller has most recently spoken.

Beyond the applications announcements, Aspect revealed some very interesting metrics. Looking at the prior years sales, revenue is split as 35% inbound, 35% “blended”, and 30% outbound. What’s more “Unified IP” has accounted for 44% of its sales. Another bit of background from the preview call was the description of “distributed call center” or network of gateways to promote scalability. “Gateways” are in Bangalore, New York City and London with a Contact Center ACD operating in Miami. I don’t know the complete details, but it sounds like there’s a cloud-based strategy for Aspect in there somewhere. Coupled with Microsoft’s strong commitment to Office 365 and Lync Online cloud-based” implementations of Unified IP 7 are a natural way to scale up and go global simultaneously.

Advisories are available to registered users only.

For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).

Advisories are available to registered users only.

For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).

Meanwhile, at the posh Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Cisco held its second Collaboration Summit featuring major updates and extensions of the resources that support both intra- and inter-company collaboration, as well as collaborative customer care. The Twittersphere was also alive with comments from the Defrag Conference in Denver, and tweets surrounding a variety of talks about generation, control and filtering of streams of BIG DATA provided a counterpoint to presentations of enterprise infrastructure, architecture, software and services that encourage collaboration, communications and conferencing.

In Cisco’s case, the day-and-a-half of briefings on architectural pillars, product descriptions, strategy discussions, customer testimonials and demonstrations, provided vivid pictures of usecases for the rapidly maturing line of core technologies – including social platform and IU associated with Quad, the inter-company communications support of IME, the Android-based Cius tablet, and the virtual desktop. Collectively they provide Cisco customers and partners solutions that leverage the core functional elements: Interoperable Open Architecture, Flexible Deployment Models, Enterprise Social Software, Pervasive Video and Secure Intercompany Communications.

I’ll be issuing an advisory next week with more details on the contrasting approaches being taken by Microsoft and Cisco. My top-line thoughts follow:

For customers and technology partners looking for Microsoft to fulfill on its promises surrounding Lync to facilitate PBX replacement, the company does not disappoint. For those looking for a UI (user interface) that supports multimedia messaging and conferencing, Microsoft Lync delivers those goods as well. Indeed, if you are a customer that is steeped in the server-side architecture where Active Directory houses the company directory, Exchange is the core of email and messaging and Office applications are the foundation of productivity, Lync is your glue.

Cisco’s approach puts much more emphasis on the rapid arrival of “pervasive video” as the model for interpersonal and intercompany communications. It will require some retooling of the way that broadband media streams are managed from endpoint-to-endpoint, but Cisco and partners are working on many of the answers there. Another point of major departure revolves around the contact center, where Cisco has a vision that embraces social networks (with Socialminer), Capture and analytics and a new desktop (Finesse) that serves as a “container” for all sorts of agent and supervisor apps and instances. By contrast, Microsoft will depend partners, led by Aspect, InteractiveIntelligence and PrairieFyre to deliver on contact center functionality.

The implications and promises of the two approaches are the core subject of my forthcoming advisory.

While monitoring the Tweetstream surrounding the announcement, I noticed that more than a few “unified communications” (UC) experts referred to the service as an example of UC. I strongly disagree. The service doesn’t really unify anything. Facebook is just taking control of all the streams that cross over into its walled garden and then delivering the results in a context that makes it most deliverable to the user. (This approach has already begun to raise privacy concerns exemplified by this Tweet from HARO founder Peter Shankman “So all our chat/email/text/IM history in one place – That Facebook will OWN? No thanks.” I don’t think that’s the kind of UC people want to buy into.

On the other hand, there’s a lot going on under the hood with FB messaging that has nothing to do with UC and showcases the power of RC concept. As the peripatetic Robert Scoble points out in a Tweet “Geeks will like this. Facebook’s new messaging system is built on Cassandra, hBase, Haystack, Thrift, ZooKeeper, memcache…” These are examples of the rich base of open source assets that today’s RC adherents have to work with.

That rich genetic material also includes cloud-based instantiations of Microsoft’s Office Suite as explained in this blog post by Takeshi Numoto, a Corporate VP at Microsoft:

As shared in Facebook’s announcement, Facebook’s new messaging platform integrates the Office Web Apps to enable Facebook users to view Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents with just one click. As you know, Office helps you create stunning documents that bring your ideas to life. Now you can easily share those ideas with your friends and family on Facebook. I’m really excited about being able to make it even easier for people to use Office to access and share information across different devices, networks and platforms. With the Office Web Apps on Facebook, you have even more ways to express yourself with Office and easily share your thoughts with people that are important to you.

If it is “unification” it is highly selective and user powered. True to Darwin and the notion of natural selection, there will be aspects of “facebook.com” that are destined to enjoy high popularity, usage and longevity. With Microsoft’s endorsement (the software giant holds equity in Facebook), it has the potential to become a powerful platform for sharing and collaboration inside and among enterprise employees and partners. I don’t see a robust link to reliable communications infrastructure (meaning a relationship with a network operator) at this time, but would expect some of the global network operators (and infrastructure providers) that are already Microsoft partners to figure out how to profit from business efforts to support (and control) social interactions emanating from desktops and cubicles.

Of course, I’d also like to see more initiatives around support of voice services.

Lync’s progress through the Microsoft code mill has been accelerating. We noted the name change in this blog post on September 13. At that time, 120 enterprise customers were already using the software as part of Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program (TAP). In that previous post, we said that getting details on partnerships was a bit difficult, however that was remedied in this September 14th posting on Microsoft’s TechNet blog. It shows the specifics on 30 hardware, software and service vendors with products to showcase using beta versions of Lync. In addition it claims “more than 400 partners are involved in readiness activities to help customers plan, deploy, manage, and support Lync 2010 when it is generally available later in the fall.”

In the mean time, Microsoft has polished much of its marketing rhetoric to suit the times. OCS 2007 R2 was unquestionably designed for on-premises deployment preferably in an all Microsoft environment. By contrast, Lync is intimately (ahem) linked to a cloud-based strategy that Microsoft calls “extensible and open” while at the same time designed to “minimize legacy infrastructure costs,” which could mean a mass migration to softphones or, as I mentioned earlier, a higher reliance on cloud-based applications and infrastructure.
Apropos moving to the cloud, as Gregersen frames it:

If you caught our Office 365 disclosure last week, you saw that the next version of cloud productivity from Microsoft will also deliver the 2010 suite of products, including Office, Sharepoint, Exchange and Lync, to customers of all sizes. Additionally, Lync Online will federate with consumer communication applications like Windows Live Messenger (now supporting high definition audio and video), and with IM and presence with AOL, Yahoo!, Google and Jabber. Getting connected with others is a beautiful thing!

Agreed! “Getting connected with others” would be a beautiful thing. Whether Lync becomes foundational to the sort of multi-vendor, developer-friendly opportunities that characterize the age of RC (Recombinant Communications) will be determined as Lync goes to GA, Office 365 evolves and developers/partners learn just how open and extensible Lync really is.