Let’s start with the BigHand LBO: Bighand is a 16 year-old company that specializes in workflow management centered around the automated transcription and distribution of dictated documents files. It has been popular with law firms in the UK, North America, Netherlands and Australia. It has also had success in healthcare and other professional services organizations in the UK. It serves over 150,000 end-users in about 1,450 business organizations. With offices in Chicago, London, Sydney and Toronto, it plans to use the cash infusion from Bridgepoint to increase staff, grow its presence in the U.S. and to expand its Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery mechanisms targeting smaller businesses.

On the automotive front, Nuance’s introduction of Dragon Drive! , which offers its users a way to take command of the systems and services available in a “connected car.” Productivity in the car starts with local search; giving users the ability to say something like, “What good Italian restaurant is near me?”

Next up is control of music selection from a car’s storage, connected media player, or from the mobile network like Spotify. Drivers or passengers can also dictate messages for delivery via SMS/text or email and, finally, they can retrieve weather and traffic information in real-time by making “natural language requests” like “what’s the traffic like on Route 80 near New York City.”

Bottom Line: The instances of “Speechable Moments” are growing geometrically. This is the product of proliferation of automated speech processing (ASP) resources on devices and in automobiles, coupled with links to “workflow management” tools, natural language processing and databases “in the cloud.” As a result, individuals are becoming more comfortable and more skilled at using their voices to step up their personal productivity. This is destined to become self-reinforcing. Though a new entrant is often positioned as a “Siri-killer,” “the next Siri,” or “Siri for the enterprise,” each should be judged according to its ability to make things easier for a user, not its ability to replace Apple’s mobile assistant.

By 2006, Tellme had graduated to become the platform for automated, “paid” DA services from AT&T Wireless (first Cingular) and Verizon landlines. Carriers were able to charge $2.00 or more per call (which phone companies continue to do today). At the time, Tellme co-founder Mike McCue confessed to Business Week reporter Steve Hamm that “only about a million people” were using the free voice portal service.

When Microsoft bought Tellme, roughly a year later, execs in Redmond saw Tellme’s voice portal and DA platform as a way to take on Google in the local, mobile search marketplace. By the time the deal had consummated, Google countered by launching its own “free,” speech-enabled DA service, Goog411 and joined Jingle Networks and a small handful of other companies trying to coax callers into using their phones to conduct local searches and carry out business.

The idea of using your voice to transform the phone into a mobile assistant was on target, but very premature. After investing in both technology and market conditioning, Jingle Networks was purchased by Marchex in April 2011 and is now integrated in its mobile voice search product line. Google shuttered Goog411 in October 2010. At the time it noted that smartphone users could conduct voice search using Google’s speech recognition in conjunction with Google Maps.

On June 1, Microsoft will follow in Google’s footsteps (or voiceprints?) by closing its hosted voice search platforms and directing people to “visit www.bing.com on [your] PC or mobile device.” There’s no mention of a speech-enabled option – just the end of Tellme-powered voice search as we know it. By contrast, when Google closed GOOG411, it let it be known that the service had helped it build a corpus of utterances to make its voice-search more accurate, and the microphone icon is a ubiquitous feature on all Android-based devices.

In the 20 months since Google closed GOOG411, Microsoft has busily gone about recasting Tellme from the innovative provider of Dialtone 2.0 to a cast-off that is now part of multi-channel customer care specialist 24[7] Inc. During that time, the mobile assets that were exemplified by Bing411 and the Tellme Voice Portal were largely neglected and, presently, will cease operating altogether.

Six years ago, we believed that wireless DA was a viable, and sure to be profitable, vehicle for mobile business search culminating in commerce. Today, it is more likely that mobile assistants, like Apple’s Siri, are more likely to take on that role. Siri is destined to have company in the very near future as solutions providers emerge from the ranks of knowledge management, artificial intelligence, speech analytics and other closely related disciplines. Indeed personal assistants, front-ending the Internet’s vast array of information, navigation and communications resources are successfully supplanting directory assistance, front-ending little more than an enhanced phone directory, as the go-to resource to support of local commerce.

As we’ve noted before, Sensory, Inc., has long been devoted to supporting TrulyHandsfree(TM) voice control of devices and media, especially in the automotive setting, where wake up words need to be distinguished from road noise or other random sounds in the background. Voice activation has been available on the Samsung Galaxy S2 for roughly a year now. In order to reduce the power consumption required to have the device constantly listening for its wake-up words, Sensory has made sure that the technology for the trigger words are “deeply embedded” in the devices hardware.

According to Mozer, the company “always had speaker verification on our chips.” However, to support the new offer, the company switched to a new HMM (hidden Markov model) based biometric engine in order to provide higher accuracy and lower false acceptance or false rejection rates. Sensory is demonstrating an alpha version of the system running on an Android device and using the passphrase “Hello Blue Genie”. Mozer trained the smartphone by repeating the phrase three times. Then he was able to unlock and activate the phone by saying the phrase, whereupon it said “Greetings Todd Mozer.” When i said the phrase after he had trained it, the phone woke up, but displayed the word “Rejected,” and I was unable to activate any of its features or services.

A beta version of the voice activation with speaker identification technology will be available under license from Sensory in the coming week. As the press release explains, details are available from info@sensoryinc.com

I certainly hope this doesn’t start a rash of “if Steve were alive…” or “WWSD” comments, though it’s already too late for that. More to the point, iCloud, and its derivatives like iTunes Music Match and other forms document or info sharing, still has major issues when it comes to usability and transparency. In my experience, it is erratic in its ability to update calendars, contact information and other shared info. It has also been incredibly opaque when it comes to set up and initiation (through settings on each device and in iTunes), as well as its inability to manage memory on my iPhone. As I blissfully thought I could now listen to music from my library – whether it is located on the device or “in iCloud” – I learned too late that every song with a cloud icon had to be downloaded to my device in order to be played. An error message that rivals Microsoft’s “Blue Screen of Death” when I sync my iPhone and a stern warning that I have exceeded memory limits on my device.

That sucks! And it’s largely because iCloud, unlike Siri, does not do a very good job of balancing between resources in the cloud and resources on the device. If you unwittingly ask it to download more content than your device can hold, it tries to do so, until it fails.

What’s more, iCloud, unlike Siri, doesn’t learn. In today’s wireless world the smartphone+cloud paradigm is taking hold. Both iCloud and Siri take advantage of that fact. But Siri does it much more intelligently, and transparently. Siri is designed to “understand” the phone’s owner. That is vital for both task completion and personalization. It is dynamic and improves overtime as the owner provides more data and spoken input.

iCloud may be the progeny of Mobile Me, but to many Apple owners, it’s just opaque – a sticker on the side of the iPhone or iPad package or a Web page that equates it to “Find My iPhone” or “Find My Friends.” I know that Apple has long-range plans to make iCloud the repository for all the data I originate from my iOS devices. But Apple has a long way to go in educating the public to change its behavior. “Imagine… a world without ‘File/SaveAs’ menus.” That’s gonna be a tough one to sell.

Meanwhile, just seeing Siri refer to Samuel L. Jackson as “Sam,” got me to train my phone to call me “Dan” (hey, its better than “Rock God”). I think the commercials are incredibly effective, even if “your mileage may vary” when it comes to every instance of using Siri. I’ve also noticed that people who are not of Sam or Zooey’s generation (meaning younger) are very comfortable dictating text messages or emails, looking for local eateries and other usecases that Apple has already anticipated. Success breeds more use. More use leads to more accuracy. More accuracy leads to more success. Ergo: “Success Breeds Success.” Now ask “What Would Steve Do?”

Ellis has been instrumental in developing and promoting Ford’s efforts to leverage both SYNC and its close sibling, SYNC Applink, as the mechanisms for individual drivers to use their favorite smartphone apps – hands-free and eyes-forward – through SYNC. Today, the list of featured apps includes Pandora, Stitcher, IHeartRadio, NPR News; but, through the Applink Developer Program, Ellis expects the list to continue to grow, thanks to development and marketing efforts by Ford and its partners.

Ford maintains its business model, which is to “sell more cars.” It is using SYNC as a differentiator for global initiatives to accomplish its sales goals by playing up how people can use their voice to personalize their in-car experience. In addition to encouraging more mobile app developers to make their wares compatible with SYNC, it has already made voice command work seamlessly in nine languages with emergency assistance in 34 languages.

The other initiatives that are of great importance is to strike a balance between the capabilities that are “embedded” in the car and resources that are in the cloud so that the services meet every driver’s requirement for reliability – regardless of location, velocity of travel or other circumstances. Whether it’s “brought-in” or “beamed in” it has to work every time.

There are already many use cases for location aware mobile. The technology grew out of a decade of E911 initiatives, which sought to pinpoint the origin of mobile calls to police or firefighters. Today, mobile subscribers (and mobile app developers) are well-aware of the power of local intelligence and can bake location awareness into 511 calls for traffic conditions or spoken versions of services that “find-the-nearest” ATM, gas station, restaurant or restroom. There are also obvious uses for businesses managing mobile workers or service fleets.

In this announcement, Voxeo notes that it will serve as a single source of location information from a number of carriers. It also notes that it is taking an approach that complies with Best Practices and Guidelines for Location-Based Services provided by the Cellular Telephone and Internet Association (CTIA). That means that end-users must opt-in or “subscribe” to the service. Among Voxeo’s service delivery options are “single or double opt-in” as well as SMS based confirmations.

More detailed information and support, including a description of the API is available here, including a phone number that demonstrates how the call-flow will work for subscription to LBS and retrieval of weather information. Developers will be pleased to find access to an API that is “fully compliant with industry standards as an extension of the Location RESTful API from GSMA’s OneAPI.” It is documented http://help.voxeo.com/helpserver/go/evolution/LBS.

To encourage use by developers, Voxeo offers 1,000 free geolocation look-ups through the API as well as access to its developer support resources.

It started with a series of video press releases from Google’s soon-to-be device manufacturing subsidiary, Motorola Mobility. Under the headline, “Google Voice Actions Knocks Out Siri on Motorola Android Phones”, readers could see how Google Voice Actions on several models of Moto’s wireless phones carried out dictation, getting directions, posting a reminder and Web navigation tasks faster than the iPhone 4S.

One of the “knockouts” is rendered below:

I first wrote about Voice Actions for Android in August 2010 noting that “When we look back on the summer of 2010, the launch of Voice Actions for Android will be seen as a signal event. It goes a long way toward re-establishing the spoken word as the natural input for a phone (duh!).” That may have been true and it certainly rattled the chains of Microsoft (which spun off Tellme, but kept much of the IP that will power voice and gesture controlled devices) and Nuance (which, in addition to carrying out the automated speech processing for Siri, is in the process of acquiring Vlingo and continues to refine Dragon Go! and a number of initiatives that define a more Natural User Interface).

What the boxing match between Voice Actions for Android and Siri fails to capture is how real people actually use Siri. This post provides details about one person’s daily experience. While the notorious “sample of one” is indicative of only one subscriber’s preferences, it is fascinating to see how usage starts in the morning with a query about the weather and crescendos into classic Q&A exercises, giving a person a verbal way to ask someone a question before it recedes in memory. That’s the real-life use case (mostly because the idea of reciting text messages aloud fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of “passing electronic notes” in private and asking for directions aloud when you still have to touch the screen and look at a map defeats the purpose of “hands-free/eyes forward” navigation.)

But I have to say that this announcement, coming out of MWC, caught my imagination. A joint venture between embedded ASR specialist Novauris and Existor Ltd, a technology firm that applies artificial intelligence to the challenge of creating “conversational,” spoken interfaces. The two companies plan “to combine their expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing and automatic speech recognition (ASR) to create mobile and wireless applications that allow people to interact conversationally – not just with smartphones and computers, but also with cars, refrigerators, TVs, toys or any device equipped with a suitable embedded processor.”

The ambition to make consumer electronic devices, appliances and automobiles more conversational is very compelling. Nonetheless, I believe the most interesting aspect of the Novauris/Existor output is the potential to remain conversational even in a disconnected state. Many Siri users have told me that their mobile assistant will duck a question now and then for no apparent reason. They speculate that access to the server “in the cloud” may have timed out. At that point Siri will ask for the user to try later or default to a Web search. In their announcement the two technology companies claim that their first output will be a series of speech-enabeled “chatbot apps,” called CleverApps which will run on smartphones without any need for access to “the cloud” over the data link.

In addition to solving the problem of getting an answer in a disconnected state, the new venture’s apps have the potential to reduce data traffic at a time when some wireless carriers are “throttling back” the speeds for heavy users and getting rid of “unlimited data plans.” With product announcements and vendor contests coming fast-and-furious, the ripple effect of Apple’s Siri launch is gathering momentum.

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.

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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.