Dispatches from Voice Search

The Speech Stars are out at Voice Search in beautiful San Diego. Though somewhat small, there is still a pretty interesting smattering of firms represented, from Microsoft on down to Google—both of whom are notoriously difficult to get on the blower (you better believe I’m doing all kinds of legwork to bring some interviews with them to you guys while I’m here)—on back to players like Loquendo, SpeechCycle, and a bunch of other names more than familiar to our readers. Walking around the marbled halls of the San Diego Marriot and Marina (which looks vaguely like a more sparsely appointed Cheesecake Factory) there are a few things that one can’t help but notice.

One. The total lack of creepy speech-enabled robotics. Despite my brother Adam B.’s crusade to bring attention to this vital and thrilling sector of speech, there is nary a mention of them here in San D. In fact, if you were to ask Bill Scholz, “Where the robots at?” I suspect he’d cock an eyebrow at you and wonder what kind of egregious error he made in granting an obviously deranged psychopath a press-pass.

Still, ever the optimist, I must confess, I hoped to find a Wakamaru speeching up a storm down the conference halls, greeting guests and pointing out where the next talk or demo would be, or perhaps merely subduing attendants with brutal force, applying slave collars to their necks, and forcing them to do humiliating back breaking labor in the robot run salt mines of Tia Juana, just an hour’s drive away. Instead, the toilets—not speech enabled—flush automatically.

Two. This one is a more serious observation about demographics: the R&D end of speech, like most technology fields with it, is dominated by men. A quick scan around any of the conference halls reveals that an overwhelming majority of the faces are middle-aged and bear the marks of Y-chromosomal development. In fact, many of them have facial hair (another interesting trend).

Male dominance of tech, is hardly a novel observation, but being at this conference you get an impression of just how sweepingly true it is. By my own count, there are less women here than fingers you might find on a meat worker in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

Three. Also in the air, but not explicitly on anyone’s lips unless you press them, is the looming sense of what havoc the recession is going to level over Speechlandia. Most everyone is putting on a brave face about their own respective companies’ positions, but when talked to about what they think of the rest of the market they laugh nervously or flash mirthless, uncomfortable rows of teeth in something that only approximates a human smile.

Everyone seems to agree there’s a lot of room for growth in mobile. It’s new, it’s sexy, it’s a way of getting the average six-pack, smartphone wielding Joe using speech in his every day life. That is building a broader market for speech as a whole in the heart of the consuming public. Mobile speech could be like a Trojan horse that gets us all acclimated to speech’s existence and convinces people that we need it every other place we could possibly cram it and gets companies willing to invest in embedding it in their technologies.

Also contributing to the hype of mobile speech growth is the vast pre-existing infrastructure for delivery. Even in the remotest villages of Laotian farmers work the fields with a cell phone clipped at their hip. Everyone has a mobile device and there are untold dollar signs to be swallowed like Pac-Man on a cherry.

I guess that presents a rather mixed picture. Everyone seems to think speech is useful—though that’s preaching to the choir at Voice Search—but they also seem to think that we may just be waiting to see who survives and gets to the other end of this to cash in. Companies without the capital to stay solvent in a credit strapped economy just may not make it on their own.

These are just some preliminary observations about the feel of the conference. Stay tuned for more and hopefully some interviews with speech notables.

Till next time, Speech Heads!