I’m not sure how we missed this. The Geek.com blog reports today that Microsoft’s speech hosting subsidiary Tellme had some interesting research results regarding social, mobile multitasking. Not surprisingly, it reveals that the group of mobile subscribers who have smartphones have their phones at ready and in use when they undertake their daily activities. Eighty-eight percent (88%) say they use their phones when shopping. Seventy-eight percent (78%) use them when “walking between places”. In a slight drop-off, those who are willing to admit it (68%) say that they consult their smartphones while visiting with friends.

Being a speech technology company, Tellme polled its subjects to gauge their level of comfort with entering commands or search terms by talking aloud. While some indicated discomfort in certain settings (Geek.com cited “a restaurant), 71% of the overall sample indicated that they would be comfortable with voice command. The further breakdown indicated high levels of comfort while walking (93%), exercising (92%), and shopping or running errands (87%). Tellme issued this press release with these findings on July 29.

There’s no question that the mobile public is taking more interest in mobile speech applications. Later this month Opus Research will be issuing a new Research Report on mobile speech applications complete with a market assessment and forecast, trends analysis and portrait of the many companies that make up the service development and delivery ecosystem, including core speech processing technology providers, application developers, device makers, platform operators and wireless carriers. As I conduct interviews for this document, it is clear that interest is heating up.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Speech recognition, Microsoft, Tellme, Opus Research, mobile speech