With the end of CTIA Wireless 2008 coming to a close in a couple hours, you can start to see the trends emerging in the industry. One of the ones that really stood out this year was the entrance of easy-to-use and accurate voice-recognition services for consumer applications. One of the biggest announcements of the show was Yahoo's (NSDQ: YHOO) new version of OneSearch, which integrated voice recognition into search queries on the phone. But other voice-centric solutions were also present, including vlingo, Jott Networks, Nuance Communications and of course SpinVox, which had a very splashy booth.
The companies and announcements at CTIA follow close behind Microsoft's (NSDQ: MSFT) purchase of TellMe last year, which has led to an integration of voice into several of the company's services. Voice definitely seems to be on a roll—Marco Boerries, Yahoo's EVP of Connected Life, explained the evolution: "We are really revolutionizing using voice for mobile—it's been around for about for 20-plus years, and on the mobile side, we are just now seeing voice applications" that are easy-to-use and accurate.
Boerries said up until now a lot of voice services worked because it limited the words a person would use—for example local business listings only. However, he said Yahoo wanted something broader. "We found this amazing technology at small company called vlingo, and they have a great product with 10-plus years in this field. You can say anything and they have this great technology to recognize it. We found it. We like it and we combined it with the OneSearch Assets," he said. "We like it so much, we made sure competitors can't use it, and we did an investment."
Here's some other examples:
-- OneSearch: The technology by vlingo gets more accurate the more people use it, and adapts to a person's accent. When searching for The Venetian, Las Vegas, Nevada, it recognized all the words but Venetian, but the user can scroll over that word and type it in, still saving a lot of time.
-- Jott Networks: It allows you to record a message using your voice, which is then converted into text to send to someone in an email. After several times using it, it didn't recognize words like "conference," instead spelling it out as Clonchen (?), but breezed by words such as Nokia (NYSE: NOK).
-- Nuance Communications: The company made several announcements at the show. It said that TeleNav will use its technology to speech-enable its mobile navigation service; Nuance launched a service that will convert voicemails to text messages or emails using a transcription service.
-- SpinVox: The company, which recently raised $100 million, was demonstrating how its service worked. A user called a 1-888 number, left a message, and was supposed to get a text message back with a text version of the service. If a word is not recognized it gets kicked out to an operator who types it in, making the service more intelligent for the next time that word pops up. Two hours after leaving one a message, I still haven't gotten a text to see how accurate it is. The company sells its services through carriers, including Alltel (NYSE: AT) and Cincinnati Bell in the U.S. The booth was impressive with the top portion being a collection of Ken-Like dolls, dressed in suits, with blocks on their heads. The blocks rotated to display different messages. The design was supposed to demonstrate the company's tagline: "Speaking Freely Through SpinVox."
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