When first we met Spoken Communications more than four years ago, it was engaged in re-engineering contact centers so that super-agents, embodying “best practices” could serve as real time coaches for groups of customer care representatives. Today, by announcing this alliance with a UK-based mobile application distributor, the center of gravity moves steadily away from the enterprise contact center and more deeply into the mobile experience. It is a direct result of Spoken’s acquisition of GotVoice in October 2009.

At that time, the company seemed to be justifying the purchase as a natural extension of its presence in enterprise contact centers and played up the ability to integrate its voicemail transcription capabilities into Microsoft Exchange-based email systems. But the lure of mobile is obviously too strong, and Spoken/GotVoice has found a point of ingress as the white label voicemail-to-text transcription solution that will be branded as ROKVoice. In addition GotSearch will be marketed outside the United States under the ROKSearch brand. For its part, ROK Entertainment adds two speech-enabled utilities to a portfolio of services that it licenses to mobile operators. Its flagship service, ROK TV, provides a mechanism for streaming video entertainment to mobile devices. But its full line of products are illustrated on this page, and include a wide variety of voice, video and text “mashups” – such as a “caption creator” service that let’s users upload pictures to a mobile site and designate “thought bubbles” to appear on the screen.

In November, 2009, ROK Entertainment acquired at text-to-speech rendering specialist called Textic, citing the opportunity to present Web-based information over mobile devices to the visually impaired. Yet, we believe that they’ll find many product extensions that benefit from lifelike rendering of text (e-readers come to mind). ROK Entertainment strikes me as a prototypic mobile Recombinant Communications application provider. Its products page resembles a list of mobile mashups as well as tools for its customers to do their own customization (exemplified by the “caption creator”). It also seems to recognize the value of employing the full gamut of modalities in its line of entertainment software – supporting voice, visual and tactile interactions. As a global channel into mobile markets, ROK is a good partner for Spoken.

Categories: Articles

Tags: voicemail-to-text, mobile speech, Recombinant Communications