Time to talk-up speech recognition
Well, that's the message from the head of Europe for speech recognition specialists Nuance. Steve Miller, who kicked off a day of get to know you sessions for press, analysts and customers with claims that:
“In Europe, the percentage of speech recognition as an interface is about one fifth of what it is in the states.”
You'll probably know the company's products more than the company itself - the brand is not exactly out there but then again – neither is voice recognition. The company's flagship product Dragon Naturally Speaking, only has a very small Nuance logo on the back (I know because they gave me a copy today but it won't sway my judgement) so don't kick yourself if you have not heard of them.
Nuance acquired the Dragon-Computing-created product about six years ago but claim it has done a lot of its own development work to improve the dictation software and are on version nine now. I am going to have a play with it over the next few weeks and see how usable it really is. The message coming out of Miller, who only joined Nuance a few months ago appears to be that they really haven't done enough to show-off the potential of the technology – and he even admitted that he didn't really associate himself with it but put that down to some poor marketing in the past which the company is trying to get right now.
To entice customers and the press over to the get to know you event – it was all held in the Mercedes World centre, Brooklands – which is the site of the world's very first purpose build race track in 1907. The theme of the day was predictably automotive and Nuance chose to show off how its speech technology is being integrated into mobiles (the marketing men kept banging on about speech enabled mobiles being just around the corner which is odd as when I last looked that is what they were invented for but I digress) so that you can send texts and emails by simply speaking – handy for salesmen who want to do ninety down the M1 while simultaneously closing a deal with Hong Kong.
Some of this stuff looks useful – we should definitely be using speech more as a way to interact with technology such as opening windows, finding applications – just to cut down on all the button pressing and rubbish menus we have to deal with. However I am not as convinced that many people are going to want to dictate emails to their phone – apart from maybe in the car which is about the only place you won't feel like a prize twit.
The other area of growth is call centres and a nice lady from Vodafone was on hand to expound the brilliance of their virtual new assistant which was absolutely and definitely not about call avoidance – oh no – not at all – none of that at Vodafone. Rather its all about “call steering” hmmm. Anyway, Vodafone has gone to all the trouble of creating a virtual personality for their automated call centre service – she is called Vicki, she is 30-35, and her favourite film is Bridget Jones Diary – so presumably she is also overweight, neurotic and a functional alcoholic. Vodafone customers can look forward to interacting with Vicki (or is it Vicky?) in the next couple of months – when Vodafone will be deploying her to help with call avoidance, oops sorry, I mean call steering.
We've put together a package of video of the Nuance stuff in action including some of the car demos – and a terrifying trip around the Mercedes test-track including some high-speed skidding action – which we'll post in the next week. Stay tuned.