Speech Heads, you’ll remember from a couple weeks ago when I posted about Bilski v. Doll that I had mentioned a forthcoming patent feature cover article. Well, I am happy to report that the wait is practically over. The issue is out the door and will be stuffed in your mailboxes in a matter of days. That is, of course, unless you don’t have a subscription, which my brother Adam B. says is “colossally stupid” since they’re free, and which should be rectified by clicking here forthwith and making with the subscribing.

In any case, as I was working on the article, trying to jam as much as I could into the increasingly meager looking allotment of words I had, I ended up having to put a lot of interesting—but ancillary—stuff in sidebars that never got printed. For your benefit (and in order to hype the article) I’ll be presenting them here all this week. So let us begin with:

Who Needs A Lawyer Anyway?

If you consider jokes a reliable metric of the way people feel, it seems no one likes a lawyer.

Walt Tetschner, publisher of ASRNews and an independent consultant who has consulted on patent applications, not only doesn’t seem to like them, he doesn’t see much use for them in the patent space. Tetschner remains fiercely skeptical of the use value of using an attorney in the patent process.

“[A lawyer] typically does not clue about the technical area,” he writes in an email to Speech Technology. “Do you know what is involved in searching through the 5 million active patents that exist in the US PTO [Patent and Trade Mark Office]?  Expecting the lawyer to discover prior art is incredibly optimistic.”

To Testschner’s mind, a technologist should be able to file for herself. Her understanding of the technology and expertise in her field (that is her inherent knowledge of the industry and its prior art) should be more capable of competently draft a patent than a lawyer as she is more familiar with the prior art in her field. Tetschner points to the PTO’s own search engine as a capable and comprehensive way of looking prior arts.

Patent attorneys, on the other hand, will defend their practice in the following ways: they are more fully aware of the legal ramifications of patents (they handle the suits and can draft patents to more adequately protect the filer—after all, for a filer, a patent is really a document about legal protection first and technology second); by having attorneys draft patents for them, technologists free their time to work on technology (prosecuting a patent is time intensive); if a patent is truly worth pursuing, it’s worth pursuing professionally.

“I’ve always told clients that if the technology has no value, don’t spend any money protecting it,” says Gregory A. Nelson, an attorney with Novak Druce + Quig. “If it does have value then the cost of professional assistance very small compared to the value of the patent. It’s more often just a question of not needing to file for everything—maybe being more thoughtful about what a company files or does not file for.”

Whether one needs an attorney or not in the end calculus is a matter of goals, means, and preferences.

Speech Heads, there has been no shortage of rumors flying around about Vicorp as of late.

In April, the London Gazette briefly reported that Vicorp U.K. Limited was being voluntarily “wound down,” or liquidated. The announcement followed a number of layoffs, wherein many staff members were immediately terminated at the end of March.  The company also seems to have moved offices in Berkshire, and, post-redundancies, is operating with what some have described as a “skeleton team” that has “risen from the ashes.”

“We are very much alive and well,” counters Brendan Treacy, chief executive office of Vicorp Group in an email to Speech Tech, though. “As a publicly listed company here in the U.K., we had the ignominy of having to inform the markets every time we hit funding or contract issues, and in the current climate being a small listed company is not a great place to be.”

Mr. Treacy claims the company has been transformed into more competitive business. Citing the $25 million of “sunk investment” in Vicorp’s xMP product, he says that the company can now afford pursue licensing and distribution more aggressively. He maintains that it has closed a number of deals in the last three months and intends to do “a lot more wholesale licensing.” He maintains, however, that Vicorp is not abandoning application development, and will continue “at rates that competitors cannot match.”

“After 28 years of trading, we are not about to give up and we have put ourselves into a strong position to maintain growth and service our high profile client base-all of whom continue to support us,” Mr. Treacy writes.

Speech Heads, I don’t know if you caught my story about VoiceTrust looking to extend its footprint via its new iPhone app, VoiceSafe, but back when I was working on the story spokesman Richard Tigges sent along some publicity screenshots of the program in action.

The pictures give you a little bit more of an idea of what the application looks like/does. In addition to storing passwords, credit card numbers, and all that sensitive information you’d expect to try and lock in a biometrics solution, you can also store secrets like:

• Someone’s birthday;
• The number to your alarm system; and
• The details of a one night stand.

It’s this last item which demands some attention. This may be some cultural ignorance on my part, VoiceTrust originates in Munich, Germany, but who stores the details of a night stand in their phone and then labels such details (obviously sensitive if they are being stored behind a biometric wall) “OneNightStand”?

You’ll note that it even has a little “XXX” logo next to it as if to make it more obvious. I tell you, I haven’t seen that kind of bone-headedness since my brother Adam B. got those binoculars from our dad for Christmas.

The GirlTech Password Journal has been given a make over for 2009, Dear Readers.

Even pinker than before, this iteration sports a new translucent shell and a new locking mechanism. The remake has been described by some as a drive to keep the girl-facing, biometric speech solution relevant in the current recessionary market-which has slowed the already recently slow biometric market.

The new locking mechanism may be a response to the old fold-over-styled security system that drew criticism for its perceived flimsiness. Version 6 now opens more like a book than a folder-version 5’s design, which numerous Amazon reviewers noted was easily pried open.

“It’s a piece of plastic. A nosy brother…who pries [sic] it open will break the lock,” noted reviewer K. Nettles of 5, adding, “This journal is not going to overcome problems with lack of mutual respect within a household.”

Since we haven’t been able to get a hold of a copy for ourselves, we can’t say whether these issues have been resolved. From pictures, though, it seems that the translucent cover produces new security concerns, namely that the contents are visible.

As for whether underlying speech technology supplied by embedded provider Sensory’s has been improved, we don’t know.

The journals actual ability to recognize a correct password and correctly establish a speaker’s identity has long been the source of critical ruminations in its decade’s long existence.

One review by Jed N. Kaplowitz contends that even though the journal “was so fickle about the way [my daughter] spoke the secret code, it wasn’t fickle at all about who entered it. Her brother’s voice worked just as well to open it, and it turned out my deeper voice opened [sic] it too. I could say a word that was close to the original and it would open,” he writes in an Amazon post titled “Made my daughter cry.”

“My daughter tried using it by hiding it in her room, but she quickly lost interest in it, and now it’s on the bottom of her toy box,” the post adds.

The GTPWJ also has its fair share of devotees of course; it has, after all, been in manufacture for 10 years.

One review by Lydia Cummings gushes “I own one, and it is such a wonderful thing to have!…I know all the secrets to owning it,” before offering a number of tips which require owning a piano and speaking your password at a consistent tone.

I asked Sensory’s CEO, Todd Mozer, if he knew whether there had been any updates for the GirlTech this time around and he wasn’t sure. Apparently, there are and have been a couple of different versions that are on the market.

By our own count there are six GirlTech versions, the Zizzle High School Musical (HSM) Secret Journal with Musical Password, the Bratz Passion 4 Fashion Secret Sign in Journal, and the Hannah Montana Secret Keeper Diary Journal.

Mozer says that the journal is his company’s longest running product, lasting something like 10 years.

“I’ve heard that it’s the best selling girl’s electronic product of all time. I’m confident it’s also the best selling consumer/low cost biometric product in the world,” he writes in an email to Speech Tech Blog.

Since its inception, the product has seen several IC upgrades and three technology upgrades. It’s gotten a ton more physical makeovers, too, and I expect we’ll keep seeing them if they keep selling. I expect my brother Adam B. will keep buying them too…

Speech Heads, if you haven’t caught wind of this, since May 15th Nuance Communications has been running its “I Speak Dragon” contest.

The contest calls for users to share their experiences using Dragon NaturallySpeaking in one of five categories: professional, personal, education, field services, and legal. The winner of the contest could get a spankin’ new Kindle2 reader (with its increasingly limited access TTS—-though expertly provided by Nuance nevertheless) and FREE DRAGON NATURALLYSPEAKING UPGRADES FOR THREE YEARS!

It’s been on going for almost two months, but the call for entries will be closing at the end of June (yowza!), so you better get to steppin’ two and a half weeks!

Check the rules here for submission guidelines and a click here for categories explanations and to submit!

I will probably be entering myself.

I’ve been secretly transcribing my brother Adam B. for several months now, using NaturallySpeaking. He does a lot of mumbling at his desk and violent threatening and I’ve been trying to build a civil suit against him for bodily harm, psychological damages, and endangerment.

Here are some transcribed samples caught from the microphone I have hidden on his desk:

• “When I’m talking to a speech solution I am nude or I am nothing”
• “Listen buddy if you’re looking for a fight I’ve got a five on-premise deployments for you right here”
• “Oh that That’s just my afternoon gin app It’s hosted”
• “The real future of speech is in silence” —-this my brother Adam B. said to me when I asked for his views for my 2009 prediction feature. He slammed my head into the copier about five seconds later adding, “I also predict that there’s a concussion in your future!” but he screamed this really loud and distordedly so that it was transcribed as “Pie dictates conclusions for future.“

I’m thinking of filing this under “legal.” What do you guys think?

Congratulations to all of you Speech Heads out there in the IVR space!

According to DMG Consulting, the next two years are going to be sweetbacked, money-raking years. The whole kit and caboodle is going to be worth 2.7 billion clams by 2011.

In a press release, the consulting firm said that the recession has actually sped up the pace of IVR adoption and “infused momentum into the hosted/managed service” market-the latter being a trend that we’ve all been noticing around the office since back in January. In this shameless display of horn-tooting, I’ll refer all you IVR-cats to my feature that predicted as much (though truth be told it was a kind obvious call).

DMG says that IVRs are also flying off the customized shelves on the strength of new applications, rapid deployment, and recent innovations. It projects a four-year CAGR of 13.4 percent for hosted/managed-inbound IVR and 18.7 percent for the outbound IVR segment (great, more robocalls). Sales of premise-based IVRs are expected to decline as hosted and the overall market rise, perhaps a symptom of atrophied cash reserves and more trust in providers.

The consulting firm also notes that organizations of “all types”—-big ‘uns, small ‘uns, governments, higher ed., non-profits, and a dozen such entities of similar stripe that poo-poo’d hosted/managed service IVR yesterday are not only reconsidering today, but BUYING.

So to you future billionaires out there in IVRs, I ask the following: if in some smoky drawing room any of you should engage in some weird bet amongst yourselves about nature v. nurture and decide to put your conflicting ideas to the test by pulling some roustabout scamp off the street, furnishing him with millions of dollars, a mansion, butlers, and scores of elegant dinner dates with beautiful heiresses, please consider me your roustaboutish scamp.

Speech Heads, the speech stars are going to be out for the NY/NJ/CT AVIOS Local Chapter Meeting, on June, 17th.

Hosted at Microsoft NYC, this not-to-be-missed speech gala is being billed as a mini-Voice Search, San Diego (which, if you didn’t make it, was absolutely kickin’). The Chapter Meeting will include abbreviated versions of talks given in San Diego by some of the speakers local to the Tri-State Area.

The affair will feature:

• SpeechCycle CTO Roberto Pieraccini’s elocution on Multi-Modal/Multi-Channel Enterprise Voice Search: The Future of Customer Care;
• Executive Director of Speech Research at AT&T Jay Wilpon’s talk, Mash it up! – A speech mashup framework for mobile voice search;
• Google Senior Staff Engineer Johan Schalkwyk’s thoughts on the Challenges and solutions in voice search technology; and
• The Council of Senior Centers and Services of NY’s Technology Analyst, Michael Greene speechifying on matters of Enhancing accessibility and personalization through senior friendly design.

You’ll find them all from 6:30 – 8:30 pm, Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at Microsoft in NYC, the Palace Room, 1290 Avenue of the Americas (6th Avenue), New York, NY 10104-0101.

To register email: info@avois.org

P.S. If you’re still on the fence (like my brother Adam B.), then check out these impressive bios:

• Roberto Pieraccini, Chief Technology Officer at SpeechCycle, uses his broad advanced speech research experience to assist creating the world’s most advanced phone-based speech product with continuous innovation in data-driven machine leaning for interactive systems. He has worked at prestigious research labs such as CSELT, Bell Labs, AT&T Labs, and IBM T.J. Watson Research, led an R&D team at SpeechWorks, and he has written more than 100 papers and articles.

• Johan Schalkwyk has worked in the Speech Industry for over 15 years. Johan is the one of principal architects behind the Google Speech Recognizer, and spearheaded the push for open ended speech recognition for mobile devices. Google VoiceSearch is the culmination of these efforts.

• Jay Wilpon is Executive Director of Speech Research at AT&T. He is the leader for many innovative voice enabled services, including the world’s first spoken language understanding service – AT&T’s “How May I Help You”. Altogether, Jay’s work has resulted in billions of dollars of savings and revenue growth. He has authored over 90 publications, and was honored as IEEE Fellow and AT&T Fellow for his work in speech technologies and services

• Michael Greene had the good fortune of being laid off from the company he’d worked at for two decades, five years ago. He went back to school for a masters in social work and now works directly with children, consults on technology for senior-service organizations, and often ponders and occasionally publishes about better human-computer interfaces.

This morning, the Supreme Court granted Bilski v. Doll hearing, setting the stage for a show down over whether business methods are actually patentable.

DUM-DUM-DAH! (dramatic music)

For those of you out there in Speechlandia who haven’t been watching the stormy patent waters, this is big news. The Bilski appeal is a challenge to a ruling made back in October by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The appeals court decided that a patent for a process for predicting and hedging risk in commodities markets (seems like these guys are making a muck of everything lately, don’t it?) wasn’t deserved because it wasn’t tied to a machine and did not result in “physical transformation.”

This is a reversal of a ruling the same court made back in ‘98, when it decided that anything outside of natural laws and abstract ideas was more or less patentable.

As you probably suspect, the October decision has far broader implications than just the financial services sector where the patent had come from.

A decision in this case from the highest court has the potential to strike out an entire class of patent that sprung up over the last 10 years.

According to Business Week, after the ‘98 decision there was a deluge of patent applications.  “More established companies raced to add such patents to their portfolios, if only as a defensive move against rivals that might beat them to the punch.”

In 2005, the periodical notes, IBM received more than 300 business process patents despite the fact that it was openly questioning their legal basis entirely.

A lot of I.T. folks have been shaking over this because the ruling seems to make patents much harder for the technology space where new processes that aren’t “physical transformations” aren’t as obviously patentable. These critics feel that the ruling will result in a reduction of patents in the space, and a slowing down of innovation.

“These are key areas. There have been recent decisions that followed Bilski and struck down some patents that we thought were patentable,” said Michael Jakes, a patent lawyer for Finnegan LLP who will argue for Bilski before the Supreme Court, to Reuters.

Others, like Stephen Albainy-Jenei, an attorney for Frost Brown Todd, suggested in March that Bilski was “much ado about nothing” in part because “clever attorneys can still get their ‘business methods patents’ past [the P.T.O.] by casting them in the form of machines that manipulate data.”

He goes on to say that even Amazon’s infamous “1-Click” patent, (an often invoked offender against all that is decent and right about patents—my words, not his) includes claims directed to machines, rather than limiting itself to just process claims.

It’s difficult to say what will result from the case, and it will probably be about a year before we would even see something handed down. By then the court will probably have a new justice—-Judge Sotomayor if the President gets his druthers.

On an interesting note about Sotomayor, according to The Blog of Legal Times, her former husband Kevin Noonan, a partner at McDonnell, Boehnen, Hulbert, and Berghoff, said Bilski is “spreading like a stain” to mar a broad range of patents. No clues as to whether that has any impact on Judge Sotomayor, herself.

Whatever develops though, my brother Adam B. and I will keep you posted.

Look for my feature on patents in the July/August issue of Speech Tech due out in a little more over a month.

SpinVox recently ran a survey among Americans, British, and Canadian users of Ping (a service that allows users to update social media via voice through SpinVox’s ASR) to, at least ostensibly, “reveal new slang emerging in the Twittersphere.”

The results produced by the study were the sort just ripe for blogging about. As much as 84 percent of SpinVox’d Twitter users admitted to using the service in public mid-travel, while 23 percent admitted to tweeting from the john, A.K.A. “the W.C.”

Whether or not this means public restrooms and there’s any overlap between that 84 and 23 percent is unclear. SpinVox did not provide a Venn Diagram.

Thirteen percent of users said they used the service on a treadmill, 25 percent jogging in the park, 37 percent while cooking, 17 percent outdoors events like music festivals, 8 percent, and 5 percent waiting in lines.

The “top 10 Twitterverse-releated slang words” (I’ll in the new tradition of making annoying words out of “Twitter” call these “Twitterese”) SpinVox found in the SpinVox “Voxgeist” (C’mon! Really?) are:

• Hashtag (noun): a way of marking an event or common theme e.g. “I’m off to Mobile Geeks of New York #MGoNY”
• #Follow Friday (term – pron. Hash Follow Friday): a weekly event, where you recommend your favorite Twitterers to your followers.
• Dabr (noun): a mobile web interface for Twitter.
• Twetiquette (term): appropriate behavior when using Twitter.
• Twitpoll (noun): a survey/question posed on Twitter, often for research. Sometimes just for fun: e.g.: “Which shoes should I buy?”
• Tweetdeck (noun): one of the most popular desktop interfaces for Twitter.
• Twhirl (noun):  a smaller, less intrusive desktop interface for Twitter.
• Mashable Effect (term): the result of @mashable, aka Pete Cashmore, founder of Mashable.com, re-tweeting your site/blog address and causing it to overload with web traffic.
• Tweetup (noun): a meeting organized on Twitter.
• Twestival (noun): a charity event organized using Twitter

Strangely missing from the list, my brother Adam B. points out, are “speechtacular,” “Speechlandia,” “Speech Head,” and “None of your speechness.”

I have to say, I’m a bit skeptical of how scientifically rigorous this effort was myself. SpinVox hasn’t released a methodology, so no word on sample size or how these figures are derived.

When I asked the company about what kind of standards it was using, Rachel Lyons, SpinVox’s Director of North American Communications, said, “[We] would say the survey was more straw poll than census.”

Hrm.

I’m still willing to give SpinVox the benefit of the doubt here, though. I’m sure their numbers check out, but with questions asking users if they tweet on the can this survey begins to strike me as the sort of thing that is concocted to produce the whimsy and mirth that gets reposted on blogs. The kind of thing that collaterally gets the word out about the fact that you can use SpinVox on Twitter—-a clever P.R. move rather than a question of genuine scientific inquiry. In fact, come to think of it, this study or straw poll or whatever seems suspiciously like a lot of other top ten list based posts that SpinVox has made to be blogged about…

On that count, Speech Heads, I suppose we’re guilty, but why not make yourself complicit in shameless marketing, too? Make sure to follow Speech Tech on Twitter! http://twitter.com/SpeechTech/