The Voice Search Conference winds down around 5pm tonight, but by then I’m on the flight back to NY.
Another journalist I spoke with said he got all excited when he listened to the opening keynotes, but was inevitably disappointed towards the day’s end due to the overall lack of focus on voice search itself.
I feel similarly; many of the panels didn’t have a lot to do with voice search (and they all could have used more live demos. If you’re going to hawk a solution, I’d like to see it in play). Loquendo’s Paolo Baggia told me during lunch that he was going to give a talk called Improving the user experience.
“It’s not really about voice search, though…” he said.
Both Bill Scholz and Bill Meisel stated in the panels they moderated that they’d defined voice search “very broadly.” To what end? To what extent is it beneficial to have such a vague definition? If you’re going to devote an entire three-day conference to a topic, shouldn’t that topic be clearly defined?
The conference did highlight issues regarding voice search (whatever that may entail). Click below for the rest of the article.
- How do you organize voice search results so they’ll be relevant to the user?
- To what extent can you seamlessly integrate a voice search interface into an application?
- In what form and when will the voice search interface be adapted by John Q. Public?
- Is the speech recognition technology ready to handle unstructured searches?
- How should speech be integrated within a multimodal interface? Is it an alternative or an extension of the GUI?
- How do you navigate the current business landscape – one that’s not always eager to finance the development of new interfaces?
Those seemed to be the pressing questions for me, but I’m sure there are more. Post in the comments.
Some last quotes:
“If you write this story and do not include (name of vendor), I hunt you down in New York and I kill you.”
“Oh, Speech Technology Magazine. Yes. You guys focus pretty heavily on contact centers, don’t you?”
“(The Voice Search Conference is) smaller than what they hoped, but better than what it might have been.”
