It’s time for another edition of the Speech Tech blog’s regular feature, “Crushes & Hexes.” Appearing every Wednesday, we highlight companies, places, technologies, or people we deem praise-worthy, or cringe-inducing within the speech/tech/IT world. As always, your feedback is appreciated! Email us at blog@speechtechblog.com if you have a crush or hex item you’d like to see online.

Crush: Speech Technology in the Mobile Market
Why We’re Loving It: After a few days of uncertainty regarding Nuance and Android, we got a definitive answer yesterday from Mike Thompson at Nuance (see yesterday’s post). The verdict: “We’re actively participating,” Thompson says. Cha-ching! In other Nuance news, the company announced it had signed a multiyear deal with Samsung to incorporate its speech recognition technologies into Samsung mobile phones. But one of the biggest news items was SpinVox’s $200 million-announcement: the company received that much in fundraising rounds with investors like Goldman Sachs. After an impressive showing at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, SpinVox has really been hitting it big-time, and with the $200 million, they’ll be doubling the number of mobile providers carrying its voicemail-to-text technology, as well as investing in an Advanced Speech Group in Cambridge.

Hex: Vishing – Giving VoIP and Contact Centers a Bad Name
Why We’re Hating: Following VoiceCon, I kept in touch with Krishna Kurapati, president of voice and information security company Sipera Systems. He sent me a brief email yesterday about “vishing,” or the use of VoIP/Internet phones to trick callers into thinking they’re getting in touch with a call center, when in fact their personal information is being poached by fraudsters. I’m too young to remember, but my mom tells me that people were hesitant to use ATMs when they first hit the scene — I worry that, because VoIP is still relatively new to the call center, that this will make people not afraid of speaking with their company, but also help them learn more about identity protection. In a February 2008 article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, writer Teresa Mcusic put it this way:

These so-called “vishing” attempts are on the increase because costs are going down for international phone calls, thanks to Internet phones, and identity-theft call centers are popping up all around the world targeting the U.S.

[Photos courtesy Wikipedia & SecureComputing.com]

We had the following comment attached to a previous post:

Re Android: Google seem to have quietly removed the speech.recognition package from the Android API. I say quietly: the removal is noted in the API Diff specification for M3-RC37a to M5-RC14, released 15th Feb, but I haven’t been able to find any more public announcements – for example, it wasn’t mentioned in the m5-rc-14 release announcement.

Google have also not responded to a couple of queries about android.speech.recognition on the android-developers mailing list.

I was also very interested when Android was launched last November, especially with the involvement of Nuance, and the prospect of an accessible speech tech API. However, the speech tech parts of the Android API were never made available and now they’ve been removed. It’ll be interesting to see what the iPhone has to offer.

I had Mike Thompson, vice president and general manager of Nuance Mobile on the line yesterday so I asked him if indeed the speech recognition package had been dropped.

The Nuance response, from Mike Thompson:

No that’s not true. The outlook is just as positive as it has been all along. We’re actively participating. The exact release cycle of their SDK, what’s included and what’s not, why things get included and why things don’t, I don’t know all the details of that but things are very positive on that front and marching in the same strategic direction they were.

If there’s more to report, I will.