Spoken Communications Inc. is definitely changing and adapting. On October 8th the company bought most of the assets of venture-backed GotVoice, a voicemail-to-text transcription specialist. Barely a week later, Spoken announced that its newly acquired technology will be integrated into the Microsoft Voicemail Preview Partnership that will ship with Exchange Server 2010. Thus, MS Exchange-based “unified messaging”, as promised in the mid-1990s moves ever-closer.

Incorporating Spoken’s technology with the new Exchange Server will allow voicemail recipients to read a transcript of a stored message or click on an icon to listen to the .wav file. They can also treat the voice message like text, meaning that it will be possible to edit, reply, forward, archive or delete the message from a “unified” inbox. Admittedly, this is but one flavor of deployment for GotVoice. Since its founding in 2003, the company has struck deals with communications infrastructure providers like Shoretel, CallTower and IPiphany. It even made an effort to deliver an iPhone-like “Visual Voicemail” service through its mobile Web site.

The sale to Spoken represents an exit strategy for GotVoice and its investors that promises to bring fully-automated transcription services into a contact center agent’s workflow. At the close of a call, the agent can toggle over to GotVoice to dictate information to create a trouble ticket and call summary. This application of GotVoice’s technology is closely tied to Spoken’s long-term objective of using “hidden resources”, including live agents, enhanced speech processing and call processing technologies to improve phone-based customer care.

The MS Exchange-based initiative is an artifact of GotVoice’s core Voicemail-to-Text transcription business, where it is a long-time competitor to Nuance Communications, DiTech Network’s Simulscribe (PhoneTag) and the high-profile SpinVox, as well as Google, where the ever-improving voice mail transcription is a standard part of the Google Voice call management service, which will ultimately be integrated into every Android-based smartphone. When you consider that mobile speech solutions providers like Vlingo, Yap and Promptu will also include voicemail-to-text transcription, we believe that the quality of service, user experience and user awareness are all destined to improve.

As for Microsoft’s role in all of this speech-enabled and mobile activity, it continues to display strong symptoms of schizophrenia. We’ve totally lost sight of some excellent development work by Tellme’s mobile business unit. Meanwhile, according to this report by Emil Protalinski in Ars Technica, the Colossus of Redmond sill officially shut down Microsoft Recite at the end of this year. The Recite application was one of those “neither-fish-nor-fowl” phenomenon that lacked survivability. It was like ReQall with Yap or Don’t-Forget-the-Milk with Jott, in that it allowed mobile users to save spoken reminders, but it was never integrated into a calendar or alerting mechanisms. Instead, it merely let its users locate and retrieve their notes by speaking the search terms at a later date.

As noted in the last paragraph of the Ars Technica piece, Microsoft has not been shy about shuttering other end-user facing non-starters, including Microsoft Money, Microsoft Encarta, Windows Live OneCare, Soapbox, and Windows Live Events.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Microsoft, Recombinant Telephony, Unified Communications, mobile speech