News from Beijing is that a consortium of mobile voice technology providers, led by manufacturing giant ZTE ,will be employing a common set of protocols and practices to voice-enable mobile devices and services. With participation from long-time partners like Audience, Nuance, AutoNavi, Baidu, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the group will be promoting what it calls the “5A” protocol, referring to “clear guidelines” for device makers and applications providers to follow in order to foster services that are available to Anyone, Anyhow, Anytime, Anything and Anywhere.

Adam Zeng Xuezhong, CEO of ZTE Mobile Devices and Executive Vice President of ZTE Corporation, noted that his company “believes that voice control is the future of smart mobile phones” and noted that “it has already become ZTE’s core strategy.” But he also acknowledged (perhaps in acknowledgement of efforts by Microsoft, Apple, Google and others to promote their touchscreen-based OSes and devices) that “the current mode of touch screen control is deeply rooted in the behavior of users. Change can only come when voice control becomes more practical.”

As noted here, Nuance and ZTE have a year-long history of developing and promoting a voice-enabled “car mode” for mobile devices. Audience and ZTE have made great strides over the years to employ audio processing and filtering to help distinguish spoken words from background noise. AutoNavi, which is now owned by the publicly-traded Alibaba, has been working with Nuance and others to offer voice-controlled maps and navigation services. Search giant Baidu – as we reported in 2010 – has hired an impressive staff of speech processing experts, and offered services that range from voice search (a la Google or Bing/Cortana) to voice biometrics-based activation of mobile phones.

The real importance of ZTE’s strong endorsement of the Smart Voice Alliance is its wingspan. It is already one of the largest manufacturers of mobile handsets and, in its boilerplate self-description, claims to have “partnerships with more than 320 major carriers and distributors in over 160 countries and regions around the globe. It also has strategic partnerships with 47 of the world’s top 50 carriers. While it is clear that the future of mobile communications is multi-modal, the Smart Voice Alliance is designed to ensure that voice is well-integrated with text, gesture and touch based natural user interfaces.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Articles, Mobile + Location

Tags: mobile voice, intelligent Assistants, ZTE Corporation, Smart Voice Alliance