On the eve for the GSMA Mobile World Congress, Microsoft has made a “speech search” application called Microsoft Recite available for smartphones running the Windows Mobile 6.0 and higher. Among speech-enabled mobile search applications, Microsoft Recite is neither fish nor fowl, and whether it’s a pure red meat application could be up for debate.
I listened to a replay of Aspect’s Sr. Vice President of Strategy Mike Sheridan’s Webinar for industry analysts. Aside from imparting surprisingly good news about revenues in the final quarter, the biggest take-away was Aspect’s unswerving commitment to Unified Communications in general and Microsoft’s flavor of UC specifically. The former means that Aspect expects to transcend the confines of the contact center and go enterprise-wide. The latter signals that its approach is deeply integrated with Microsoft’s .Net architecture as well as sales of Exchange Server, Active Directory and (oh yeah!) Office Communications Server 2007 R2, which includes OCS Voice for SIP-based call handling and the vestiges of Microsoft SpeechServer, called its “Developer Edition.”
Next week, Opus Research expects voice-activated services assume a more prominent role at the GSMA Mobile World Congress. Then again, I feel like we say this every year. Then, when it’s all over, I write the obligatory survey of the exhibitors, presentations, products and services that make use of speech processing technologies for service delivery.
This year will be the same in many ways. Voice services, in general, will take a back seat to some of the more high-profile, glamorous and lucrative services. These include SMS-texting, downloading ringtones, gaming, navigation and ultimately watching (or sharing) video entertainment. But that backseat analogy is quite inaccurate. Voice as an input modality is taking on an increasingly important role in front of the most popular services. In short, if it works on a wireless phone, it is easier to access by speaking. Let’s not forget that, although they increasingly act like computers, personal navigation systems, MP3 Players, game consoles, and wireless handsets are, at base, phones.
Blame it on iPhone and Blackberry
The multiplicity of applications and services made available through iPhones, G1’s and other touch-screen smartphones are made possible by simplifying the process of product ordering and service initiation. The addictive nature of the “Crackberry” is due in some part to the simplicity of retrieving and originating both business and personal email. Frequent users are likely to do more with their phones. They will add new services, download more content or media and, most importantly, stay loyal to their carrier.
Voice-activation, by simplifying order entry and service initiation on the majority of wireless devices, should be in the driver’s seat, not the backseat of any mobile conference. In the post below, using Nuance Voice Control 2.0 as an example, I further dramatize my point.
In challenging financial times, customer care professionals have more incentive than ever to look to third parties to support phone-based self-service and assisted services. The reasons remain remarkably consistent through good times and bad. Quite simply, companies want to control costs without sacrificing the quality of care they extend to their clients, customers or prospects.
Although every communications and professional services firm openly touts support of unified communications (UC), only three can deliver on the promise of true UC. Microsoft, emanating from its presence on nearly every desktop; IBM, from its position of strength in the connective fabric called middleware; and Cisco, leveraging its dominance of broadband IP-based routing and transport. Oracle has enormous potential to play in this area with strengths relating to its dominance of relational database management and CRM, but magnum leader Larry Ellison is skeptical of the whole UC concept … and he’s probably right.
These economic times don’t just try men’s souls; they squeeze corporate spending. Today there are pressures on both capital and operational expense budgets for companies of all sizes. This is the time when leading-edge companies try out the few new technologies that save them money while enhancing their ability to forge better connections between their customers and customer care resources. Office Depot’s selection of Transera’s Seratel platform provides a case in point.
Voice Biometrics Conference London 2008 is the only venue dedicated to determining where, why, how and with whom you should deploy speaker verification, speaker identification and other voice-based biometric solutions.
Last week, longtime Microsoft watcher Mary Joe Foley opined that Microsoft has a “grand plan to eliminate phone numbers.” She cited direct quotes from speeches that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have made among the international carrier community. Foley refers to a new software “platform” called Echoes designed to enable telecom service providers to sync diverse address books, seamlessly send messages between IM and SMS and assign a local telephone number to people using Windows Live Messenger.
Rather than concentrating on Echoes, Microsoft would have a better chance of eliminating phone numbers with “voice dialing.” It would involve speech-enabling the contact list, associating multiple “namespaces” (meaning phone numbers, IM user names, aliases on social networks, etc.) with an individual’s identity and then replacing dial-tone with a spoken prompt like, “what’s up?”
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Unified Communications has entered into the silly season. After massive re-branding and promotional efforts by major communications and IT infrastructure providers, the term has lost all meaning. The UC landscape today is more like one of those multilevel, Plexiglass chess boards. But providing communications and content in a context that directly benefits end-user is the point and is the root of Contextual Communications.