Okko in Speech

A no-frills phone with the unlikely name of Zumba Lumba has recently received some attention by the BBC. The phone is said to be top-secret, developed by a defense-aviation company. It does without frills like a camera or an applications platform, but touts some interesting security and computational features, (not only) related to speech technology:

• Cloud computing – the phone uses no local storage for contacts, data.
• Network speech recognition – user input is recognized over the internet. This should avoid hardware intensive local computing for voice input, but requires internet access.
• Voice identification – enhanced security, because the phone will only respond to a single user’s voice.

Some seem to think this is a potential iPhone killer at least in terms of making use of innovative input modalities (though Google already released a speech recognition app for the iPhone.) Others simply thinks it’s a hoax.

Either way, the idea of joining mobile with cloud computing is interesting. Using voice identification for security has its appeal as well, even if it’s unclear whether keeping data in the cloud and sending voice data over the internet is any more secure than simply keeping data on your phone, locally.

So the big news this week is Nuance’s acquisition of the month: Tegic. Tegic supplies T9 predictive text input to several mobile phone manufacturers. The acquisition represents Nuance’s recent focus on acquiring mobile technology market companies. It serves Nuance with a strategic customer base, including obvious candidates for Nuance’s speech technologies. Aside from the strategic benefits, the technical result of mixing predictive text input with speech is interesting and something to be followed.
Coincidentally, the woes and comeback of using speech for I/O on mobile devices are described in these articles this week.
Lastly here is an interesting interview with Lin Chase, director of Accenture R&D in Bangalore, India, who held several prominent positions in the speech tech industry in the past. Topics include speech, women in the industry and why Americans should travel.

Ok, I’m back from vacation and finally sorted through some of the recent developments in the speech world. Going forward I will probably post longer but less frequent tidbits here.

Biggest recent speech news is the acquisition of VoiceSignals, broadening their mobile end user market as well as adding some nifty voice features in short messaging and mobile phone usability.
On related news, here is a short article describing the role of speech in unified messaging.
Lastly, here is a description of progress on open-source telephony and speech recognition.

Today on the WWW:

• Several embedded TTS news articles, including accessibility, navigation and usability features.
• LingvoSoft announce web-based translation services, including readback of translation using TTS.

Today on the WWW:

• Nuance announces voice search framework, based on directory assistance solutions portfolio.
• Epson releases speech synthesis chip, powered by Fonix engine, allows mixed output of synthesis and pre-recorded speech.
• Loquendo text-to-speech gives speech to Activa Multimedia iVAC avatars.

On the WWW today:

• LumenVox announces 400th Asterisk PBX developer employing LumenVox ASR Engine.
• VoiceSignal announces Blackberry 8800 integration.
• Talking Technologies announce real-time speech-to-speech translation software.
• Microsoft PBX with ASR. News seems older, and subsequent of MS’s TellMe acquisition.

On the WWW today:

• Rogers Wireless Canada and Nuance parter for mobile services.
• across Systems unveils localization and translation web-client software.
• Nuance Focus acquisition closes.
• Genesys launches multi-modal voice and video plattform.
• DMG Consulting publishes speech analytics report, predicts huge growth and improved call center QA.