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The program serves as an antidote to the reticence that IT and customer care professionals have shown (especially during the economic downturn) toward launching the lengthy design, deployment and debugging processes associated with natural language understanding (NLU) and enhanced call processing. The pitch is quite simple. Nuance first shows that callers benefit from shorter wait times and fewer call misdirections when a well-designed Call Steering app is deployed. Then they demonstrate how companies can benefit from shorter wait times and greater cost certainty when they adhere to a fixed scope deployment approach.

The term “fixed scope” is well chosen. Based on years of experience with Call Steering implementations among large global companies across multiple vertical industries, Nuance understands the application characteristics and communications architectures that will benefit from Fast Start. It has distilled those learnings into a “configuration file” which provides a foundation and design framework for getting started. Customers and clients are not being offered a “crippled app” or proof-of-concept, instead they are deploying the same code that has worked in full scale deployments.

The constraints have to do with the demographics and architecture of targeted companies. Based on experience in the field, Nuance recognizes that Fast Start will work most effectively for firms limited to 80-100 call destinations and 5-10 instances that require serious interpretation of “disambiguation” of a caller’s intent. In those cases, implementations can be completed in as few as 90 days and the total start up costs are a significant discount from the “full service” approach.

The offer seems very attractive to healthcare providers and utilities where companies have high standards for customer satisfaction but often lack the call volumes that justify investment in NLU. As Foley explained, Nuance had observed a threshold in the 10-12 million calls per year range (with some of the largest systems handling over 100 million calls each year). Fast Start can make Call Steering attractive when annual call volumes are less than 4 million. The clear message coming from Nuance is that “Natural Language Call Steering” is not too expensive for mid-sized businesses.

Several languages and dialects are supported, as are frameworks and software to support mobile, multi-modal interactions. You can keep up to date by referring to this descriptive page on the Nuance Web site.

It is becoming increasingly evident that we are well into an era that takes us “Beyond the SDK” in the mobile world. While this offering does not fall into the category of a speech API, it does overlap with many of the initiatives that mobile API providers have launched to fire up the creative juices of the app developer community. As the makers of “tools,” “reusable code,” and “development environments well know, developers gravitate toward the well-understood, well-documented and familiar. Spoken input and output from mobile navigation devices and apps conform to those three criteria.

The new capabilities are packaged as a downloadable app, called FlexT9, for phones running Android 2.1 and above. I call it a “mashup,” but that belies the design horsepower that Nuance put into the app. While competing input providers (like Vlingo, Swype, Swiftkey and Google) tackle one or more of the modalities, Nuance is the only UI that lets mobile subscribers to speak, trace, write or tap or type input based on their inclination, orientation or situation (Aka “Context”).

Nuance provided Opus Research with a demo copy of the software and it has lived up to its billing. Each of the modalities works quite well and, collectively, overcoming the shortcomings of Android’s “native” keyboard. The speech recognition component of FlexT9 for Android is a full-on instantiation of Dragon Dictate Anywhere. That means it can be used to originate email and text-based SMS as well as to post to Facebook, update Twitter or conduct Web searches or other activities that involve populating text boxes. Text entry takes advantage of Nuance’s long-standing experience with “predictive texting,” leveraging its acquisition of Tegic in 2007.

But the real differentiators start when users choose to take advantage of “continuous touch input,” which Nuance calls Trace, and the in order to create their input quickly. While it feels a bit “hopeful” or “aspirational” at first, users find that the continuous touch input can be remarkably accurate, and the application lets them review their input and correct results before ultimately touching the “send” button.

As for the ability to “write” input, long-time communicating PDA users will be reminded of the venerable Graffiti-based input, originated in the bad old days by Palm. In this case they can form “naturally shaped letters, entire words and phrases, numbers, symbols, accented characters and more on the touchscreen, and instantly see results.” It takes a little bit of learning on both sides (meaning that the system is adaptive) but, according Nuance’s Matt Rivas, a “surprising” and “substantial number” of users choose to trace their input.

From my perspective, based on our role as analysts and as users, FlexT9 goes beyond alternative UI suites. It is really UI-squared because it encompasses multiple “user input” modes and, at the same time, creates a better mobile, multimodal user interface. And, while this may in the long run strengthen Google’s competitive advantage by making Android more user-friendly, it also provides users with a glimpse of the future of the MMUI (Mobile Multimodal User Interface) which will be fundamental to the successful broad acceptance of user-controlled messaging, search, entertainment selection, navigation and you-name-it.

One thing lacking is recognition of “gestures,” which is a capability in which Microsoft – with Kinect and its offshoots – is investing a lot of hope and R&D expenditures. That said, Nuance has implemented an impressive set components that comprise a very useful mobile (and ultimately multimodal) user interface.

And now, in this video Dena describes a use case whereby Scotiabank was able to deploy an outbound alert service based on Nuance’s Notification Hub, which was up-and-running in a matter of days and provides a service for which bank customers pay a premium.

Certainly, there are a number of speech-enabled applications on Apple’s showcase device but none, thus far, has cracked the code (so to speak) required to support spoken input of SMS texts. In our mobile speech report, we generated profiles for over 26 firms that offer speech-enabled mobile applications. Many of them have a flavor of voice dialing, dictation, voice search or other application tailored for the iPhone. Yet, until today, we believed that Promptu would be the first to have its voice-in/SMS out service up and running.

“For a limited time” the Dragon application is available for download to iPhone owners in the United States. The revenue model for such an app is subject to change, but Nuance stands to learn a lot about user expectation for this flavor of mobile speech application sans cost. As a sample of one, I’m fairly happy with the service. As with all transcription services, the recognition is not perfect, but it appears to be in the 90% level. By design the application performs transcription and then displays its results which can be tweaked or changed by the message originator before choosing to “Send to Mail”, “Send to Text Msg” or “Send to Clipboard”. These three options provide a simple way to use “copy-and-paste” functions native to the iPhone to meld voice transcription into all common message flows and use cases, including text messaging, email, memo writing and even search (although, compared Google’s integrated “Voice Search”, that use case is a bit of a stretch).

This remains early days. On the iPhone, this is by no means the “hands free” texting utility that the world has a crying need for (although it has much of the foundation for hands free use). Other voice-to-SMS application will now come fast and furiously. Promptu, for one, has told us that its speech-to-text iPhone application is in the final stages of approval with the IPhone gatekeepers. The limited time “free” offer will be subject to change as well, as speech enabled service providers experiment with various value and pricing propositions. What’s indisputable is that the power of the current technology to recognize spoken words and phrases with enough accuracy to support a commercial offering on one of the most highly-visible platforms for innovation.

For more information on the growing roster of firms offering speech-enabled mobile applications see our report, “Mobile Speech: Unlocking Personal Apps, Features and Functions,” (September, 2009).

One of the first competitive responses comes today from Mio Technology, which is expanding its use of Nuance Vocalizer for Automotive to provide spoken, turn-by-turn directions on a broader a variety of PNDs. Mio, which was founded in May 2002, now offers its products in over 58 countries and has offices and operations in Taiwan, mainland China, Europe, North America, Australia, Japan and South Korea. It has a global presence, but has recently been playing up its role as market share leader in Central and Eastern Europe. Its current product portfolio employs Nuance Vocalizer to support 20 languages, including all major North American and European languages.