Some of what Apple describes conceptually, Vlingo is putting into practice with the release of its SuperDialer for Android application. Greg Sterling writes about it here, noting that it is designed to take on Siri for local, mobile search. Yet, with “SuperDialer” Vlingo is delivering an easy-to-understand use case for a voice-based front end to messaging resources, social networks, search and, ultimately transactions.

Nuance, for its part, reminds us that the automobile is destined to be the ultimate smart, mobile device. The companies have jointly expanded the range of speech-enabled features and functions it is offering in conjunction with Ford as part of “MyFord Touch”. By adding more first-level commands and making the interface more dynamic and personal, the initiative is designed to make a person’s voice “the primary in-car communications interface.”

Establishing the primacy of a user’s voice for command and information entry in cars and on smartphones remains a tall order, but the speed at which solutions providers introduce new refinements is definitely accelerating.

While announcements in the domain of network devices often fall into the “telco plumbing” category, this one is significant because it signals that transcription and delivery of spoken messages will be more routinely integrated into the product offerings of the “multi-screen” (TV, PC and mobile phone) carriers. This press release surrounding the Nuance partnership includes a testimonial from the AVP of Commercial Products at Frontier Communications, welcoming the enhancement to the carrier’s existing voicemail facilities. Indeed, the major purpose of the partnership is to make it easy for MetaSwitch’s existing customers to add a popular, revenue producing feature.

MetaSwitch claims about 500 customers in North America alone. The list includes OEMs like Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola, but really focuses on all manner of carriers (with publicly announced customers listed here).

The focus of ng Connect is LTE, referring to the “Long Term Evolution” of 3G mobile, a term which, itself is trademarked by the 3GPP (3G Partnership Project). Both the 3GPP and ng Connect seek to develop applications and services that take advantage of the high throughput, low latency and plug-and-play nature of the underlying technologies. It is considered a stepping stone toward the 4G (and the as-yet unspecified 5G) environments which promise higher speeds and larger cell sizes. In joining ng Connect, Nuance is the lone provider of key speech processing technologies (Automated Speech Recognition and Text-To-Speech) as well as the predictive texting applications that can fulfill requirements for the new requirements for command, information input and dialog that users of mobile applications require.

Toyota, though its U.S. Sales Division, is the lone automobile manufacturer participating in ng Connect. Nuance has already had its speech processing technologies integrated into the Ford SYNC system (along with Microsoft and BSquare). Through its participation in ng Connect, Nuance hopes to benefit from sharing results of shared customer research, technology development and market conditioning and promotion. In the automotive domain, Loquendo is probably Nuance’s most direct competitor (with well-accepted solutions in “embedded” text-to-speech and speech recogntion, well-suited for both in-car systems and mobile phones).

Yet there is no better place than a moving car to showcase the value of high-speed, wireless links and low-latency access to shared resources built around maps, games, social networks and associated data stores. Accurate speech processing is important, but so is elegant orchestration of real-time transactions, asynchronous and synchronous conversations and a broad variety of interactions. In the car Microsoft, with Bing Search, Maps and active Windows development community of developers are already pitted against Google with its voice search, maps and Android developers. Joining the ng Connect community immediately expands Nuance’s hooks into a broader community of technology providers that stand ready to cooperate to bring more services to market.

The track record for these types of consortia is spotty. While participants profess to promote an “open” or shared approach to solution development, participating companies have shown a pre-disposition to protect their brands and their perceived competitive advantage. Still, we wish them luck.

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Cisco SpeechView with Nuance Voice-to-Text transcription will automatically transcribe all voicemail messages and deliver them as email, with attached audio files for review and the caller ID in the subject line. Cisco will package the service as part of its Unified Communications System 8.0. It will be marketed through authorized Cisco channels in North and South America and Europe SpeechView featureing Naunce Voice-to-Text messaging. Initially the service will support English, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish. The audio message remains in the user’s voicemail box and can be retrieved at any time.

The agreement with Cisco validates Nuance’s decision to focus its development and marketing efforts on enterprise customers and communications service providers. Thanks to the acquisition of Jott and SpinVox, as well as the internal development of its own “Voicemail-to-Text” service, the company has already forged relationships with AT&T, Vonage, Bell Canada, Rogers Wireless, Virgin Mobile Canada, Optus, Vodafone, Vodacom, SaskTel, TELUS, Movistar and others. All services leverage the Dragon NaturallySpeaking dictation software, but may employ the human element that live transcribers bring, to provide the most accurate renderings possible.

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Symbolically, the move signals that Nuance (especially with the Dragon brand) is emerging as the most-favored speech-processing technology across Apple’s broad spectrum of computing and communications platforms, including personal computers, notebooks, laptops, iPhones, iPods and (we would supposed) the upcoming iPad. As we’ve all learned from the “Google phenomenon”, the more utterances that a company is able to collect on behalf of a broad customer base, the better the odds of accurate rendering of spoken words. Stated differently, deeper integration into Apple’s application environment should translate into a better user experience as those users help computers “learn” to understand what they are saying.

Google’s “cloud-based” approach to speech recognition makes it “platform agnostic”, therefore we will continue to see speech-enabled Google applications on iPhones and other connected platforms. Google will continue to use the voluminous amounts of spoken phrases to expand a portfolio of offerings that already includes search, transcription and translation. Nuance’s is responding by forging relationships aimed to make its speech-enabled applications work well on Mac’s and other Apple branded products, while at the same time supporting multimodal communications on a wide variety of mobile handsets.

Now, all eyes (or ears) should be on Microsoft, the only other “superpower” with the ability to define and refine speech-enabled user experience across platforms and modalities. With its own speech recognition “engine”, a dedicated speech app server farm called Tellme and some excellent “voice search” apps operating under the Bing brand, it has the potential to compete. But, as Greg Sterling noted in this post about the introduction of its new mobile operating system, it has definitely bestowed second-class status to its voice enabled services.

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.

Nuance has acquired SpinVox to "accelarate its voice to text business." According to the release the transaction was worth $102 million with a third of that coming in Nuance common stock. From the release:

As the estimated number of operational voicemail boxes in the world has passed one billion, and consumer and corporate activity now generate over 150 billion voicemails a year, Nuance and SpinVox have experienced strong interest in voice-to-text automation. The two companies helped pioneer solutions that utilize speech recognition and transcription workflow solutions to convert voicemails into text that can be sent to users as SMS or email messages. This transaction marries innovative speech solutions and robust carrier-grade infrastructure to accelerate innovation, and deliver these voice-to-text services to global subscribers.

And from the SpinVox blog:

Okay, so what does this mean? Without question there is an accelerating demand from carriers, consumers and enterprises for robust speech-enabled services and automated voice-to-text platforms – in fact, SpinVox already services nearly 100 million users worldwide. With that in mind, Nuance will leverage SpinVox’s carrier-grade voice-to-text infrastructure, network product portfolio, multi-language support and experienced UK-based development teams to further drive and accelerate adoption of voice-to-text around the world.

This is great news for customers who will benefit from both the technology strength and superior product and services delivery. There will be more services, more applications, highly accurate voice-to-text transcription and the best delivery platform available – no matter where you are in the world!

SpinVox a year ago in March obtained $100 million in a massive funding round and more than $200 million in total. The company was rocked by scandal when it appeared that most of the speech-to-text transcription was done by humans and not by machine, as had been claimed.

The company had an outstanding £30m ($48.2 million) loan that it was having difficulty repaying.

While this is obviously not the outcome SpinVox envisioned a couple of years ago, Nuance picks up a valuable addition to its suite of enterprise and consumer voice applications, a range of existing clients and a large installed base of users.

I had povided my thoughts on the SpinVox acquisition last week. I called it a coup for Nuance, but I also see it as an important development for incumbent telcos. Transcription of voice messages extends the life of existing voicemail platforms and is the missing link in the evolution messaging services that prove their value to end-users by going well-beyond simple “message waiting” notifications to the delivery of complete messages as email or SMS texts. This breaks down long-standing boundaries between voicemail and email, and transforms the telephones role in message origination.

SpinVox had taken considerable heat for its decision to involve live agents in the “disambiguation process” required for accurate rendering of spoken words. Yet, to me, this is yet another flavor of the high-tech-plus-high-touch combination that make real-time services truly useful. Both Nuance and SpinVox have placed a premium on accurately rendering voicemail messages. It was a tactical choice and a differentiator, especially against Google Voice (which is thought to be 100% automated).

As I say repeatedly (often with accurate rendering) 100% accuracy in transcribing voicemail is a pipe dream. Both human-aided and totally automated systems are notorious for their failures to recognize such things as street names and other proper nouns, and that situation is unlikely to improve. But this failure, in and of itself, creates the seeds for stronger bonds between people who send or receive messages from one another.

Admittedly, this is not like cracking “The Da Vinci Code”, but there are game like qualities to figuring out some of the messages that are received as spoken words and rendered as text messages. In most cases, the meaning comes across loud and clear. Besides, as is true with applications from Nuance (Voicemail2Text) and SpinVox (in many flavors) recipients can listen to MP3 files of the messages as attachments to the email or links to the SMS text. The value of text-based delivery is undeniable, as is the high probability that at least one of the words or phrases will be inaccurate [I'm going to address this phenomenon in a CATScan called "The end of 5 Nines... Hallalujah!"].

Combine the factors mentioned above and you’ll understand why it is more important than ever for Nuance to expand the potential user base for its voicemail-to-text services. Google has gone full-speed ahead with notoriously inaccurate voicemail-to-text rendering deeply embedded in its Google Voice services. At this point, accuracy is not the issue (though it is important to be as accurate as possible); global reach is the objective. SpinVox’s contracts with global carriers is very important to both Nuance and the carriers, themselves, as they prepare to compete with Ma Google (the Search Giant as Telco).

It’s also a potential win for end-users. As Google has so often proven, accurate treatment (of search queries or spoken utterances) improves with volume. The combination of Nuance and SpinVox can create the critical mass of users required to result in a highly-accurate service while, at the same time, posing formidable competition to Google Voice.

To be clear, Thompson assures the public that Nuance uploads the names for a single purpose: to improve the application’s ability to render the names inside a dictated message. From experience Nuance and its cohort of speech-to-text service providers are well aware of the difficulty of recognizing proper nouns. Therefore, the firm has opted to upload names only. They are not associated with other contact information or with the identity of the device and its owner.

Still, “privacy”, broadly defined remains a very sensitive matter, and a hot-button issue. Some of the specific concerns (such as the one from a “defense contractor” who needs to certify that his list of contracts is under his control or in a secure server) militate toward Nuance offering a simple “opt-out” option upon initiation of the app. We’ve learned that Nuance has already added that option for “version 1.1″ which has already been proposed for expedited treatment by the AppStore gatekeepers. This “opt-out” out strategy is considered a short-term fix by Nuance. The size and scope of responses (albeit many are anonymous) is leading the company to “explore options that give users more control over what gets uploaded.” (quoting a post from Nuance Sr. Manager Nirmalya De).

I, personally, don’t believe that uploading contact names to improve recognition amounts to a “illegal disclosure”. At the same time, I applaud efforts to make mobile subscribers (and Web users in general) aware of the meta-data of their own creation that can be used to refine and improve services. Nuance has learned an important lesson: that wireless subscribers should control the information that they store on their mobile devices. But, in the mean time, the wireless public has made its general preference known: According to today’s post on the Dragon Dictate Blog, the app jetted to the upper echelons of the iTunes App Store’s list of downloads, achieving #3 among all free apps and #1 in the “business category.”

It is early days for adoption of speech enabled mobile serivces, but the public is clearly willing to test-drive (I should say “text-drive”) the latest application.