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.

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.

Dragon TV has an uncanny resemblance to Vlingo’s “Virtual Assistant for Smarter TV” described by TJ Leonard in this blog post. The post includes an embedded video demonstration that was first released in December 2011. TJ also notes that the acquisition of Vlingo by Nuance, which was announced in late December, is not likely to close until later in 2012. In the mean time, both Vlingo and Nuance will continue to promote their products. It’s all the more entertaining for CES attendees and all folks following the speech enabled electronics world.

Neither Nuance nor Vlingo are destined to be alone in their efforts to replace TV remotes with simple spoken instructions. As we noted in an earlier post, Microsoft has a number of initiatives around Kinect that are designed to bring all of the goodness enabled by xBox (games, streamed entertainment, Web navigation) under the control of a combination of voice and gestures.

Japanese Consumer Electronics giant Panasonic has a long-standing relationship with Novauris and will be reportedly rolling out voice controlled TVs later this year. The two companies reportedly co-developed embedded speech recognition software under the NovaLite brand for use by Panasonic directly, or under license to other TV and consumer electronic manufacturers.

Meanwhile, even in the absence of any efforts by Apple to provide tools or APIs for 3rd party developers, the Web is awash in demonstrations of “Siri hacks” designed to take control of household appliances and electronic devices. The video below (courtesy of Vimeo) is especially amusing because it shows the developer actually bolting a black box onto the back of a TV.

Siri Universal Remote from Todd Treece on Vimeo.

It doesn’t end with the TV and game console. As this article by Emma Woollacott in TG Daily points out, LG Electronics has packaged a whole suite of technology under its ThinQ brand to enable people to listen to spoken instructions and also provide verbal feedback, like when a washing machine is in need of a new bearing. It is by no means a new idea, either. This patent, issued to Panasonic (then called Matsushita) in 2006, describes a voice controlled “Home Agent Server” for taking command of household appliances. It references prior filings from Nokia, LG and ultimately AT&T, dating back to 2003.

So the pattern is in place. Embedded processors, high-speed wireless data links and server farms “in the cloud” are delivering on the long-promised vision of “Voice Control of Your Connected Life” in ways that are accurate and reliable and less subject to ridicule (although maintaining a sense of humor has been an important part of ongoing marketing efforts).

Last October, when Apple elevated Siri (beta) to a “showcase” position on the iPhone 4S, it accelerated speech processing’s momentum into the mainstream of the mobile user interface. It also attracted serious investment among the software, search, e-commerce and mobile giants as they battle for share of an inchoate Conversational Commerce marketscape, where the $5 billion annual market cited by Nuance’s Mike Thompson in this press release is just table stakes.

When it comes to aggregating and assimilating companies that have developed important elements of the mobile user interface, Nuance has been prolific. As a result, the conversational user interface that spans automated speech and text entry drives more than half of the $975 million in revenue Nuance generated in first 9 months of its current fiscal year. Its “Mobile and Consumer” division accounted for over $270 million, while its “Enterprise” group, whose growth is increasingly driven by mobile and cloud-based services, accounted for $212 million.

While duking it out both in and out of court, both Vlingo and Nuance introduced impressive mobile assistants. As we chronicled last February, Vlingo’s roadmap for its virtual assistant includes voice dialing; originating and receiving email, text messages or tweets; and taking control of search and navigation are all done with great accuracy and ease-of-use. Its path to growth involved geographic expansion and the addition of new languages and features. However, from out point of view, the real differentiator has been truly hands-free operation, as demonstrated by Vlingo’s T.J. Leonard in this video.

Meanwhile, Nuance has proceeded to build momentum around its Mobile Advantage services and the “Prodigy” development initiative. Dragon Dictate has an growing corpus of utterances and supports multiple languages. Dragon Go! demonstrates the power of adding natural language understanding while integrating a limited number of destination sites on the Web to support e-commerce and better outcomes for general search. Nuance’s challenge now will be to integrate the best of Vlingo into the Prodigy project. Right now, supporting both brands and services will be the least disruptive path for current Vlingo users.

Regarding Nuance’s acquisition of Vlingo, antitrust should not be much of a concern. Efforts to build the conversational mobile user interface involve direct competition among Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.com, today and will add every major mobile device maker, mobile carrier and “cloud” service provider in the very near term. Collectively, these companies and a number of smaller, earlier stage technology firms will continue to compete and constantly improve the overall user experience as spoken input and command of the features and functions of phones, tablets, TVs and autos becomes routine (when appropriate).

Here are the important findings as reported by Nuance:

62 percent of respondents have more than 11 usernames and passwords, and that they forget their passwords between one and five times a month. Each time a password is forgotten it’s lost time that could be spent being more productive at work or at home. In addition, 74 percent of those surveyed have been blocked access to important information while using a mobile device because they could not remember their log-in information. The survey also found that 80 percent of respondents use the same password for multiple accounts if it fits the password criteria.

More detailed findings can be found here.

When viewed as a whole, the responses reveal that present solutions to mobile security are both inconvenient and insecure. There are no surprises in that. There should be no surprise in learning that 77 percent of respondents would be comfortable using voice biometrics as an alternative if it meant tighter security, and that a combination of voice and a password or PIN was preferred by 61 percent of those surveyed.

These findings are a significant upgrade from a survey conducted in 2009 by contactcentres.net in Australia and New Zealand. When asked about their preferred methods for identity verification, voice biometrics rated first, but only by 45% of participants, followed by PIN (21%), password (18%) and personal details or history questions (16%).

Nuance’s Twitter poll shows how dis-integrated our mobile identities have become. I fall into the category of individuals with well over 11 user names and password combinations across mobile communications and commerce sites. I was also one of the respondents who was locked out of a site after mis-remembering my password while trying to rebook a connecting flight through a mobile Web site. How I look forward to the day when I can use my voiceprint for more convenient authentication.

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?

On the iPhone 4S running iOS 5.0, holding the Home Button down for 10 seconds will start Siri. For many handsfree Bluetooth earbuds, holding the “activate” key down will do the same. Once invoked, Siri lets phone users speak to their phones in their own words. In the demo, Apple iOS engineer Scott Forstall showed three different ways to get Siri to provide local weather, ranging from “What’s the weather?” to “Do you think it will rain?” [Here's the commercial - complete with Ray Charles in the background - that Apple will be running to support Siri]

On prior versions of the iPhone, holding the Home Button down for 10 seconds invokes “Voice Control” which enables phone owners to use their voice to control playback on their iPhone or initiate phone calls. Deep integration of Siri enables users to treat their phones as a voice-activated assistant with the ability to conduct Web searches, dictate and play back text messages and carry out voice commerce (by search Yelp! or OpenTable to choose restaurants and book seats), in addition to voice dialing and media control.

The introduction of a Siri-powered Voice Assistant represents the “re-emergence” of Siri because a Siri app is already available as a free download from the iTunes AppStore. iPhone owners who now launch the app are greeted with this message:

I’ve been replaced! The new Siri is even smarter and better looking than me [sic], and waiting for you on the iPhone 4S. Ill be leaving for home Oct 15th

This signals that Apple is destined to de-activate Siri in two weeks, when it may move to the home button on all iPhones. But, in the mean time, it enables iPhone owners to use “plain English” (or the language of their choice) to find restaurants, nearby movies by title and showtimes, events and businesses. They can ask Siri about the weather (as was demonstrated in the live demo at the iPhone 4S launch), order a taxi, request reminders and even originate Twitter posts.

Introduction of Siri for the iPhone 4S represented a step forward for the service. Activation with the Home Button simplifies service activation. Close integration with message origination is an important enhancement. Most importantly, Apple – because it failed to introduce the iPhone 5 – in effect made Siri, and natural language interaction over its mobile devices, the center of attention. The only other features that merited mention as bold moves forward were the dual mode (CDMA/GSM) aspects of the new phone – making it in effect a ‘world phone,” and supposedly higher data transmission speeds.

The only step back was the characterization of Siri as a “beta” product. Phil Schiller, head of product marketing for Apple, sounded almost apologetic as he introduced Siri “as a beta version,” as if, were it to fail, he could say, “I told you so.” That said, the demos worked as anticipated and the crowd seemed impressed. In addition to getting weather information in three different ways, Forstall used Siri to set the phone’s alarm clock, listened to and replied to a colleague’s text message and provided instructions to the iPod application.

The relationship of Siri (which is “powered by Nuance”) to Nuance’s Dragon Go! is something of a conundrum. Both let users speak to their phones to use Phil Schiller’s words, “the way they wanna talk.” But Siri is initiated from the Home Button. Vlingo is in the running as well. It has been true to the Virtual Assistant roadmap that it outlined to us earlier this year.

Apple’s announcement of Siri should have a ripple effect as millions of iPhone users recognize that speech recognition works reliably and has been well integrated with the services that they regularly use. It feels like speech enabled mobile services have reached an important inflection point.

True to their word, the engineers at Waze have steadily added to the app’s voice-based features and functions. As noted in this post in the company’s “By the Waze” blog, TTS-based driving instructions have been a feature of the “Commuting Widget” available for download from the Android Marketplace. Then, on September 22, Nuance Communications let it be known that the voice rendering of navigational advice in the Waze applications for both Android and iOS-based devices was using a cloud-based instantiation of its flagship text-to-speech rendering software called Vocalizer Network as invoked from Nuance Vocalizer Studio.

In a separate, but related story, Nuance also announced that it had retooled the packaging of the services and features of the Nuance Mobile Developer (NDEV-Mobile) program. As described in this press release, the new configuration offers third-party developers three distinct tiers to simplify how they use Nuance’s Dragon speech recognition on multiple mobile platoforms, including Windows Phone 7, in addition to iOS, Android and an http-based Web interface. Since its inception in January 2011, the program has registered over 4,000 mobile app developers and, according to the Nuance Press Release, it “has voice-enabled some of the market’s most popular apps, including Siri, Price Check by Amazon, Ask for iPhone, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, RemoteLink from OnStar, SpeechTrans, Yellow Pages and AirYell from Avantar, iTranslate, Taskmind, SayHi Translate, Vocre, Bon’App” among others.

The ability to voice enable search, navigation and translation has captured the imagination and energy of mobile app developers. But the notion of knitting each function together to act as a personal agent is the ultimate enticement.

The latter app, Mobile Voice Control, provides companies with the ability to employ Dragon Speech recognition to speech enable popular applications. It is the same resource that is integrated into Siri, Price Check by Amazon, Ask for iPhone and many other speech enabled mobile services.

The complete Mobile Advantage Portfolio will add more natural language processing under the name NaturallyMobile and stronger authentication mechanisms employing the capabilities of Nuance’s line of voice biometric based speaker verification. The objective is to provide its enterprise customers with foundational resources to support a better mobile experience for their customers.

I agree with the company’s researchers, product managers and general management with the belief that the combination of strong authentication, accurate speech recognition and better language understanding supports better conversational commerce. Opus Research’s sees conversational commerce as grounded in “Trust, Transparency and Convenience.” Nuance has distilled a parallel set of objectives for Mobile Advantage by supporting “discovery, accessibility, connectivity and simplicity.” If done right, they amount to the same thing.

Nuance is pushing ahead with the development of a platform and service architectxure with the working name of “Prodigy” to capture organize the components of a better mobile customer experience. The Mobile Advantage portfolio is the starting point. It brings together voice control with call steering while taking into account understanding and recognition of each individual’s intent. DragonGo! is an excellent precursor product for a high-quality customer experience. It combines accurate speech recognition with an engine that does a good job of imputing the speaker’s intent and then linking directly to a mobile resource that addresses the user’s need.

The number of targets is comprehensive (around 200), yet constrained, in that it has deeper integrations to popular, relevant destinations like Yelp!, Google Maps, Fandango, OpenTable. It recognizes the difference between an instruction and information that can be used for form filling. It also provides for user iteration. If it delivers query results from Yelp! when Google Maps would be more appropriate, it allows for the user to move a visual carousel to the more appropriate resource.

It is not hard to imagine how an enterprise customer care app can be adapted to the Dragon Go! approach. It is all about recognizing the customer’s intent and delivering the right resource and doing as much as possible in a user-controlled (aka self-service) model.

At Dreamforce Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff led off the conference by introducing the “Social Enterprise,” and associating that term with “mobile, social and open.” The big factors in supporting the initiative in the cloud is encapsulated in the mantra, “Easy, Open, Everyone” which, in turn, is dependent on “Logic and data portability,” “no hardware or software,” and “pay as you go.” But for a firm that touts “no hardware or software,” the demos had a decided preference for Apple iPads as the hardware platform and widgets running within HTML5 as the preferred software at the presentation layer.

Salesforce.com has retooled its core product so that it will render consistently on both iPads and Android-based tablets. Called by its URL, “touch.salesforce.com,” it will be generally available in the first quarter of 2012.

I brought up Nuance FlexT9 in the lead paragraph because I was recently briefed on a new instantiation of the text-input application, shipped pre-loaded on the latest version of Lenovo’s ThinkPad Tablet. As a result, people who purchase the devices can go to “Settings” and choose to make FlexT9 the default means to input text. This, in turn, will enable them to “tap, trace, or write” as they prefer.

Refinements in the user interface at both the application and device level are key to both convenience and increased productivity. The product managers at Nuance, Lenovo and Salesforce.com recognize the trend to tablets and we expect to see more retooling of their offerings to accommodate the relatively bigger screen.