There’s a video demonstration embedded in this blog post on Vlingo’s site. As its author explains, the Action Bar uses the same “predictive intelligence” for both voice recognition and typed commands. This allows users “to initiate actions when it’s not as convenient speak to their phones – like on a noisy bus or quiet conference room.”

Well said, and much needed. As voice-enabled applications mature, developers have come to recognize that all mobile commerce apps must support multi-modal input. This positioning is especially important on Android-based devices where, as we noted back in August, Google has made significant investment in rapid, seamless access to speech recognition for command and control of a multiplicity of apps, features and functions on the Android, as well as dictation for populating search boxes or messaging utilities.

Mobile subscribers are the beneficiaries of the efforts by Google, Vlingo, Apple (which owns Siri), Nuance and a handful of other firms who are goading each other on to improve the mobile user interface. Improving recognition accuracy, as well as predictivity (which I know is not a word) is the task at hand and these technology companies are continually raising the bar in what is much more than “hands-free to hands-free” combat.

But Nuance’s success, both in the marketplace and financial markets, is increasingly predicated on its successful support of new mobile, customer-facing apps. Corporate spending on automated speech is down, as reflected in a 4.5% decline in top line revenues among for the “enterprise” business unit. In spite of the fact that Nuance’s roster of clients includes a healthy mix of telecom and technology companies, like Acer, AT&T, Comcast, Delta, Express Scripts, GM Onstar, IB System, Invomo, Metro PCS, Telekom Deutschland, Telstra, T-Mobile, and Vodafone.

The rumor of Nuance’s acquisition by Apple may be greatly exaggerated, but stories about successful integration of Nuance mobile speech processing into iPhone-based services is not. Today, just in time for the holiday shopping season, the company announced that its Dragon-branded technologies for “natural language” speech recognition, dictation and text-to-speech rendering is the foundation for a newly introduced Price Check By Amazon iPhone app.

The same technology provides a way for users Ask.com for iPhone to speak their queries. Ask.com, now a property of Barry Diller’s IAC, was one of the first Web-based resources designed to build communities of peers (or experts) who could answer a visitors questions. Through the iPhone, Ask.com users can get immediate responses while on-the-go.

That’s why Nuance’s future is not tied to any impending acquisition as much as it is predicated on a succession of partnerships and integrations. The Woz may have confused Nuance with Siri in the now famous “gaff”, but we must point out that Siri’s own speech recognition capability is “powered by Nuance.”

For those keeping score: Google Voice Search exists in English, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Polish, Russian and Turkish. Speech recognition is available for Android 2.2 and 2.1.

Baidu will need to introduce voice-based search just to stay at parity with Google (which is having problems of a different kind in its efforts to grow its Chinese operations). Industry analysts in China see Baidu’s voice search targeting mobile audiences and perhaps taking aim at delivery of music and entertainment. On July 2, it signed a deal with China Unicom to ensure that the carrier’s 3G phones ship with Baidu software pre-installed to facilitate search of text, images, MP3 files and news. China Unicom will introduce the iPhone later this month.

Intrepid readers will know that Baidu introduced “voice search” involving live operators over two years ago. Based on that experience, it knows the mix of questions it can expect form phone users. Like Google, it is not shy about introducing new features and functions to its core of interactive services. Analysts believe that Baidu maintains a huge lead in market share, with about two-thirds of the search business compared to 26% for Google. Yet, as Opus Research’s Greg Sterling notes in this post on Search Engine Land, Google introduced its flavor of Chinese-language voice search in November 2009. As Greg points out, there are over 700 million mobile subscribers in China and that China Unicom has twice the number of subscribers as Verizon Wireless.

We met with Vlingo yesterday. The company is previewing some new functionality and we had an interesting and wide-ranging discussion about the product and strategy. My question is: why isn't Vlingo investor Yahoo! leveraging the heck out of it? There was some initial fanfare about voice search on Yahoo! Mobile but since then there's been little or nothing.

I think that Yahoo! should aggressively integrate Vlingo into its mobile app as a discovery tool for all types of content and not just Web search. It should also build a mobile version of Yahoo! Answers and think about Vlingo as a front end to that experience. 

Alternatively our friends in Finland (Nokia) might consider buying a company like Vlingo and integrating it as a core component of its handsets — for smartphones and not-so-smart phones. 

Voice will continue to improve as a tool for a broad array of uses on the handset. Apple obviously bought Siri, which is not about voice search per se, but about semantic understanding of voice queries and matching with transactional services. And Google continues to invest in voice and see it as a differentiator. 

Microsoft of course had formidable voice assets but has not fully exploited or marketed them. Perhaps with the release of Windows (Mobile) 7 handsets we'll see a more prominent role for voice on the device. 

But Yahoo!'s got to get into the game more here. 

Selected services will launch in the second half of 2010, with global roll-out of a broad range of services extending into 2011. Both companies say they are trying to expand their global presence. Nokia’s smartphones have underperformed in the North American market, while Yahoo!’s mapping capabilities have been largely under-supported on a global basis.

Single sign on across the two sets of services seems like a very modest objective for the two companies. Nokia has been very active in the world of wireless identity management – through initiatives with Liberty Alliance among others – for nearly ten years, since the early days of WAP (the Wireless Access Protocol). Yahoo! has long offered single-sign on to multiple services by employing its OpenID offering, including a hybrid implementation along with OAuth that enables users to be quickly and anonymously authenticated on multiple secure Web sites.

The initial offering is not impressive. Indeed, more than one analyst has characterized it as the effort of two former category leaders seeking to become relevant gain. Ovi Mail and Messaging had few users. Likewise, Yahoo! Maps has lost its battle against Google Maps (and, besides, it has long been “powered by NavTeQ”). As a matter of fact, the whole idea of granting “exclusives” is antithetical to the power of RC (Recombinant Communications) because it forecloses on the idea that members of the developer community might introduce an unexpected or much needed innovation. Single-sign on may make the user experience a bit more seamless, but the “exclusive” approach seems less likely to generate compelling content or services.

In 2002, the i-Portal offered access to news, weather, sports and entertainment and had the capability to handle high volumes of activity. At about the same time, Promptu, then called AgileTV, was getting off the ground as a early-stage venture at SRI. Its core product was to be a voice-activated remote control for all the screen-based services offered by broadband carriers (primarily Cable TV system operators). The devices allowed cable subscribers to tune their sets to a selected program in response to instructions like “Find the Knicks game” or “Tune into some comedy”. Both Comcast and TimeWarner cable conducted market trials of the speech-activated remotes in 2005, and the company raised $22 million in venture funding.

By 2006, the company changed its name to Promptu and broadened its service offering to include voice-activated mobile search, including location-based services. VC’s chipped in another $11.6 million. In early 2007, another $5.6 million underwrote a further incursion into the mobile search world, with Italy becoming a major geographic focus. By this time, the entry of Vlingo, Yap and expanded offerings from Nuance under the Nuance Voice Control (NVC) brand and a number of other technology providers signaled the development of a speech-enabled mobile services ecosystem.

Promptu leveraged new attention to speech enabled mobile services to forge relationships with a number of content providers. With the Official Airline Guide (OAG) it rolled out voice-activated access to WAP-based flight information, which was branded Flights2Go.com and offered for $2.99/mo by Verizon Wireless. In September 2008 it formally announced a speech-to-text dictation service at the CTIA Wireless event in San Francisco. At Demo 2009, the company showed ShoutOUT a voice-to-SMS application for the iPhone. To the best of our knowledge, each product in the U.S. has hit considerable speed bumps on its way to mass adoption. The cable remote does not appear to have come out of trial. Promotion of the Flights2Go WAPlet does not mention that it is speech-enabled and ShoutOUT is nowhere to be found in the the iTunes App Store.

Now our eyes and ears are focusing on Italy as we look for carrier-based involvement in the text-to-SMS business. In North America, with new attention paid to the safety issues surrounding text messaging in cars, there is more incentive than ever for voice-activated texting (and Twittering) to take hold. The focus now must turn to providing the best user experience possible for an easy-to-use service that provides for hands-free, heads-up entry of commands and content. Promptu has clearly not cracked this nut, and it will not be alone it its efforts to create and popularize speech enabled mobile services.

Now GigaOm features the opinion of guest columnist Phil Hendrix, Founder and Director or the Institute for Mobile Markets Research. Somewhere behind the new GigaOm Pro’s paywall is a report from immr that professes to explain “How Speech Technologies Will Transform Mobile Use.” It’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart; but at this point I might want to frame it as “How Mobile Use Will Transform Speech Technologies.”

1) Make the option for voice input ubiquitous – We’re getting there. The iPhone 3GS is a high-visibility device, but preloaded or downloaded apps that support speech input are already on hundreds of millions of handsets around the world. In addition, dial-up services for voice-enabled search (like GOOG411 or Microsoft/Tellme’s Bing411) have the potential to be a speed-dial button away when they add new territories and languages.

2) Do a better job of managing user expectations of accuracy – speech rec will never be 100% accurate. Think of all the times that you don’t understand what a person is saying to you on the first try. Why should wireless users expect machines to be any better. It’s important upfront and by multiple channels (demonstrations, video tutorials, Peer2Peer discussions), to make it clear that systems make best efforts to capture what is being said, but may not always “understand” meaning. It may seem like a hard logic to follow, but it is vital for maintaining the technology’s potential and the caller’s low blood pressure.

3) Showcase and support new use cases and tutorials – I think that we’ve only begun to present wireless subscribers with the sorts of options that put the technology in its best light. People love to break these things. It was in this post, that I pointed to the NYTimes technology blog in which David Gallagher logged the many transcription mistakes boldly displayed by Google Voice’s voicemail-to-text transcription.

4) Never make spoken input the only option – Note that I said make the “option” ubiquitous. Under no circumstances should an application require spoken input. Google understands this. So does Nuance, often regarded as a roll-up of speech processing technologies, but really a purveyor of platforms that accept (and in many cases predict) user input in the form of text, spoken words and short codes.

My problem with the NYTimes column and other vehicles for criticism is this: they are largely “descriptive” and not “prescriptive.” Instead of showing how easily broken the new interface is, how about demonstrating what it does quite well. It captures utterances and, like a marginally good stenographer, presents a “rough draft” of what was said, along with some notation of where the input might be “iffy.” Speakers should never think of this as a finished product. At best it should provide a form of talking triage – showing the speaker, or recipient where the transcription may need a bit of work or sculpting.

At base it’s an opportunity to game the system. If people like to make a game of breaking the application (by reading Jabberwocky to Google Voice, for instance), it makes more sense to cast yourself in the role of hero and fix what’s broken in a poorly transcribed message. If voice control is to be “the sound of things to come” for mobile subscribers, it requires a much more concerted effort than the shallow effort to integrate with the iPhone or the one-and-done guessing game that Google Voice plays. Handsfree dialing and text input through a Bluetooth headset or earbud would be a nice start. Well-prompted and choreographed messaging – be it addressing and dictation of SMS or friendly prompts to help originators or recipients triage transcribed voice mail – would be a cool way to start.

Mobile voice is a big area of opportunity. IBM had been working on it for years. Nuance, Google, Vlingo, Microsoft/Tellme, Spinvox, PhoneTag, Yap and a few others are fielding some pretty impressive products and services. Adoption will be no accident and, even though its been years in the making, it is still early days in product and market development. In other words: The Customer Has Not Spoken.

Automated speech winnowed its way into the iPhone demo in two instances. First was the text-to-speech rendering of driving directions offered by TomTom, whose CTO put on a demo at WWDC. But the coup-de-gras was the unveiling of native “Voice Control”, a feature that delivers a voice-enabled user interface when iPhone users hold down the “Home” button. At that piont, they can use the spoken word to conduct voice-activated dialing, search their iTunes library or enter other commands to their iTunes application.

There are already more than two dozen voice-enabled applications for the iPhone, ranging from stand-alone voice-activated dialing (from the resident contact list) to full-blown dictation of text messages, Tweets or FaceBook entries. All require some sort of manual input (pressing or holding down a button) to let the device know that it is accepting spoken input.

In a move that has been a long time coming, Sensory Inc., has finally packaged its technology to support truly hands-free input to mobile devices. By adding resident “word spotting” technology to its firmware, Sensory enables the makers of Bluetooth devices (specifically wireless headsets, aftermarket “car kits”, and stereo headsets) to sell devices that let their users define phrases that “trigger” speech recognition. As Sensory’s CEO Todd Mozer observes, “”What’s been needed all along is a speech controlled technology that doesn’t require a button press to get started.”

We agree. The products will carry the “BlueGenie” brand. It will enable its users to say a simple wake-up phrase like “Hello BlueGenie” to signal the device to “listen” for an operational speech command. It is a new technology from Sensory that both works well in relatively noisy environments, but most importantly, it uses a “patent-pending” technology to minimize power consumption and avoid rapid battery drain.

We’ll be watching to see how many headset makers, ODMs and OEMs contract to use the Sensory technology. At first it will be a nice differentiator, in the long-run we see it as an important feature to prevent driver distraction.

Use of Trip Planner on the MTA’s Web site has increased dramatically over the past year. The agency reports that 18,045 people use Trip Planner “daily” in April 2009, a nearly 172% increase of the 6,640 daily users in 2008. At the same time, over 4,500 “customers” call Gotham’s Travel Information Center (TIC), on average each day. The purpose of Trip Planner Voice is to use speech automation to reduce these callers’ wait times and, thus serve more callers.

It’s early, but the uptake has been impressive: Since a controled “beta” version of the service was introduced last September, over 95,000 callers have used the service. During that time, the number of daily users increased from 382 to 746 (which, by our estimates, represents an annualized increase of 127%).

The service is an integration of Nuance’s speech recognition with a traveler information platform from Trapeze Group. It is integrated on a call handling and information management platform from Aspect Software. The deployment (coordinated by Aspect), takes a classic “form filling” approach. It prompts each caller to say his or her point of origin and destination
by address, intersection, or landmark and then provides travel instructions based bus, subway or Staten Island Railway schedule information.

Today, the service can handle 96 simultaneous users. It is offered in American English only, but a Spanish version is under development.