In a vaudevillian display of man versus machine at last week’s Conversations customer and partner event in Orlando, Florida, Nuance effectively demonstrated speech recognition as the most efficient and “intuitive” interface for wireless phones. By outpacing the world’s fastest text messenger, Nuance showcased the potential in speech-enabled mobile search [SEMS] – a critical competitive battleground that includes the Internet heavyweights (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL) and represents the next “disruptive” opportunity. With billions at stake, there are opportunities for first movers to differentiate and adopt go-to-market strategies with voice as the interface or a key component of a mobile-search offering.

The automated speech community’s flagship event led off with a keynote by Paul English, where he provided a prescriptive list of improvements that could be made to the user experience. He argued this would be more empowering to callers – more humanizing and less humiliating. His efforts have induced two leading technology providers – Microsoft and Nuance – to join GetHuman.com in an effort to produce a published “standard” of the practices that go into producing a user experience that is gratifying for the caller. But automated speech technologies represent only a small fraction of caller frustration with today’s call centers.

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Oracle has announced its acquisition of Telephony@Work (T@W) and will package its product line as the core of its “CRM on Demand” service that extends Siebel’s reach into mid-tier businesses. The new service is designed as a frontal assault on Microsoft by making the combination of intelligent routing, business analytics and interactive voice response easier to implement at a lower cost.

To reverse a downward trend for 411-based directory assistance (DA) services, BellSouth is conducting a “411 Sweepstakes” whereby callers who register their home telephone numbers qualify to win the keys to a new Pontiac Solstice. Promotional gimmicks may serve to provide short-term life extension, but it is unlikely to build a base of repeat users that give rise to the sort of annuity that DA services had been in the past.