According to a press release, Voice Application Hosting innovator Voxeo is taking the future back to the past in a very effective way. One of the enhancements to its Tropo.com API-based development platform is support of the venerable COBOL programming language. While some people may refer to it as spaghetti, Voxeo CEO notes that “COBOL still has more installed lines of code than any other software language.” He accurately adds that “[b]anks, utilities, and other large corporations depend on COBOL for their billing and operations” and that these “legacy programs can immediately become speech enabled without any further effort.”

We’ve noticed a few more press releases than normal that mention the granting of voice processing patents. Most recently, Advanced Voice Recognition Systems (AVRS) announced that it has been granted its second significant patent in the area of speech recognition and transcription. The company says that its first patent, U.S. Patent #5,960,447, was granted in September 1999. It carried the title “Word Tagging and Editing System for Speech Recognition.” The second patent, which was disclosed this month, addresses speech recognition and transcription “among users having heterogeneous protocols.”

We are neither lawyers nor patent experts but given that many of the commercial transcription services use a combination of speech processing and live agent intervention, this second patent is potentially very broad. In what could be construed as a threat to step up enforcement. Walter Geldenhuys, AVRS CEO and President, said that he believes the second patent “will enhance licensing and marketing opportunities.”

In a separate, and unrelated development, speech analytics specialist Utopy has been granted U.S. Patent #7,487,094 titled “System and method of call classification with context modeling based on composite words.” In this case, a company spokesperson told us that it is definitely “not an offensive patent.” Instead they see it as formal recognition of the fact that, in contrast to other speech analytics vendors, who take either a phoneme-based approach or resort to speech-to-text conversion before carrying out pattern recognition, Utopy’s methods are, indeed, unique.

It’s really a mouthful, but company co-founder Yochai Konig characterizes Utopy’s approach as “phrase-based contextual speech recognition-cum-understanding.” It provides the foundation for understanding live or recorded utterances in a single pass with both accuracy and completeness of understanding. It is an important component in business intelligence solutions that seek to link contact center and IVR performance with key business objectives. Utopy markets its solutions as premises-based, hosted or on-demand solutions.

In a post on AppleInsider reporter Aidan Malley is reporting a “stealth” development effort at Apple that could result in protecting iPhones with a selected biometric. According to the report, Apple published a patent filing indicating that it would use an embedded sensor or a component “repurposed from its original role” to capture biometric data that provides confidence that the individual trying to gain access to the whole device or to personal data on the device is, indeed, who he or she claims to be.

More of the mobile world is coming around to seeing (hearing?) that one of the big problems with speech-enabled mobile applications has been failure to work in noisy environments. Hence the need for YANCS (or Yet Another Noise Cancellation Solution) like Audience, Inc., and Ditech Networks.

Dan York, chief conversationalist at Voxeo, reports that a developer with the pseudonym “Devoh” used Voxeo’s Tropo API-based development platform as part of a hack to let people phone into Twitter. The new service, called Tweeter Phone, enables registered callers to hear recent tweets from their selected friends. Devoh reportedly attended a single Tropo introductory session, then went home and spent five hours to bring up the new service. This is the sort of rapid application development and API-based phone mashup that is destined to keep the telephone (most likely mobile ) an integral part of everyday communication, community-building and commerce.