Lo’ Speech Heads! From high atop Mount Apple, the sentence was handed down. Today, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, will have to find a seat outside Apple’s boardroom. Schmidt had served on the board for three years. In a statement from Apple, Steve Jobs noted Schmidt’s contributions and said that the departure was mutual.

“Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest,” Jobs said.

There may be more to the story than just that, Speech Heads. Schmidt’s departure follows a murmur of rumors that the FTC was investigating whether his position on the Apple board would constitute a violation of anti-trust laws. It also follows Apple rejection of Google Voice from the App Store—meow!—which, according to Techcrunch, is being looked at by the FCC. Apparently, Apple, Google, and AT&T were all given letters of inquiry on Friday asking about the decision. Citing pending proceedings regarding wireless access and handset exclusivity the FCC wants to know what role AT&T plays in deciding what makes it into the App Store.

No clue what the answer is, but by brother Adam B. says it’s bound to be juicy!

O’ fabulous day, Speech Heads! The good folks down at ArsTechnica have uncovered evidence that the newest iteration of the iPhone OS, 3.0, is going to come with new voice control features. The project, codenamed “Jibbler,” (sounds like a discontinued candy from the 80s) is said to have NOT ONLY voice synthesis-whoa!-but voice recognition!

According to Ars’ sources, Jibbler seems to be SpringBoard application enhancement. SpringBoard is similar to Apple’s OSX Finder app. It acts as a launcher and will support the newly announced 3.0 Spotlight search. Ars has a bunch more details that you shouldn’t miss out on (plus this terrifying picture), but we thought we’d just give our impressions here.

It seems like every little damn thing is getting speech-enabled these days. You may remember our groundbreaking reports on the GirlTech Password Journal, or the Moshi clock, talking toilet rolls, and creepy robots galore, all perfect examples of my point. All these signs seem to be pointing greater mass acceptance of speech recognition. Companies are looking, harder now that ever before, on how to make some fast bucks off getting speech into our daily lives. We’re still, of course, in the early stages where the technology is so new that we get all manner of strange things. The boundaries of what speech can and should do haven’t been entirely defined-at least not out of more traditional applications like IVRs-so people are looking to try and hype anything.

You don’t have to look any further than my brother Adam B.’s recent posts about speech-to-Twitter apps to see what I’m talking about. His two posts on our humble site have yielded a torrential flood of other speech-to-Twitter firms emailing him and commenting on his posts, trying to get him to look at their offerings. This even as Twitter, though popular and finding some legitimate CRM uses, hasn’t found a way to monetize itself. Talk about building a house on a shaky foundation.

If you’ll allow me to wax incoherent through a string of vague journalistic tritery and mixed metaphors, it’s like California 1849 out there and everybody is jumping head first in the pool, just looking for that pot of gelt at the end of the rainbow that stretches over gold-paved streets and promising rags-to-riches fortunes to all comers and investors. But you can’t put a baby in the oven and make it biscuits, unless of course you’ve ground the bones to make devil’s cake. No, no. The business of business is business and the first rule of business, business, business is location, location, location. I guess, Speech Heads, what I’m really trying to say here is that a rolling stone gathers no moss, and golly! Them stones is rollin’!

Hope you had a nice weekend! It’s raining here, and pretty miserable. We’ve been out for awhile due to an issue close, but should be back in action this week. Based on some news from RSS feeds, it looks like the day is getting off to a nice start, news-wise. And yes, that is a picture of William Shatner in his Star Trek days. And yes, this post mentions William Shatner as he relates to voice biometrics.

* BlackBerry announced its new BlackBerry Bold 9000, a new smartphone equipped with 3G capabilities. BlackBerry is one of a line of companies that have beat the new iPhone to the 3G finish line. Apple’s new version of the iPhone is expected to see a release this summer. The Bold phone is, “banking on the … sleek appearance to win over executives and field workers who’ve grown tired of sacrificing style for functionality.” I think that’s PR-speak for, “Please buy this instead of the iPhone. We made it look cooler.” [CRN]

* My favorite British pharmacy, Boots, announced it has chosen Intervoice to develop its natural language self-service application. [TMC]

* Another woman has joined the high ranks in the speech technology field — Susan Almeida will serve as vice president of global services for speech analytics provider CallMiner. You go, girl. [EarthTimes]

* Speech technology for Danish people. Yay! [PR.com]

* Sensory’s BlueGenie Lite = speech synthesis for Bluetooth devices. Todd Mozer, Sensory’s CEO, says in the article: “We’re able to replace all these awkward presses and beeping with speech.” Awkward presses and beeps – GONE. [Wireless Week]

* Every employee’s worst nightmare: Companies’ HR departments using voice biometrics to detect lying about sick days. Don’t ask me what ’skivers’ are; but it’s another funny British word to say. [Birmingham Post]

* Mother’s Day was yesterday, but I just found this article today. It’s about cool presents to buy your mom. My favorite is the ‘SmartShopper’, which uses voice recognition to store grocery lists. Great – groceries! Just what every mom wants to be reminded of on her special day. I’m also imagining the totally awesome possibilities regarding how this device could seriously mess up utterances. [The Sudbury Star]

* When I was growing up, my mom’s idea of enhancing my cognitive abilities was reading to me, and letting me watch PBS. Today? “Smart toys.” Experts say the toys, “contain technological enhancements that enable a child to form dynamic, emotional relationships. Smart toys incorporate microchips, voice recognition and wireless capability so that toy and child can spend quality time together.” This is so incredibly sad. Another ‘Baby Einstein’? I hope not, because it has been proven that ‘Baby Einstein’ does absolutely nothing that would make your child more intelligent. [The Telegraph]

* Umm…apparently William Shatner has an award called ‘William Shatner’s Heartbeat of America’ that he gives away. This year it went to a voice biometrics company. Voice biometrics: the heartbeat of America. [PR Web]

The mobile news will not stop! Today, news hit the Web that a 3G iPhone will likely be released this summer. A Bank of America analyst made the prediction: a small build of 3 million phones in May, followed by 8 million phones in June. The release of the 3G phones, which will come equipped with apps from the iPhone SDK (the beta with UI tools was released last week), could also coincide with (finally) speech on the iPhone. According that same report, Apple expects to sell 10 million 3G iPhones — analysts think this is wishful thinking; I tend to disagree. Why? Because everyone I know who owns an iPhone is my age (23), has a job paying less than $40K per year, and is willing to pay lots of money to have the newest Apple product. You can’t argue with the power of Apple Cult.

[Image courtesy of Station-A]

Holy crap. Big news from Cupertino today! Resident Speech Tech heartthrob Steve Jobs announced that the long-awaited iPhone SDK will be published. You know what this means: let the app games wars begin. Since the iPhone debuted without speech, Apple opening up the floodgates to developers could come as a means for big-name vendors like Nuance to pounce.

For anyone who attended Conversations ‘07, you’ll remember [aside from the 90-degree Boca weather] the short video aired at one of the mobile session opening speeches. In the video, a guy using an iPhone performs various Web searches using his voice — he navigates pages, writes reviews, and gets directions. So while a lot of people in my generation [30-and-under] still aren’t entirely sold on the idea of TTS and STT (I know I’m going to get flack for saying that, but you’re hearing it from a REAL 23-year-old with tons of iPhone-using friends), I’d be interested in seeing how speech heavyweights might take part in the app-building process. And if anyone would use it.

Don’t think I’m too cynical, though — OK, I am. I also enjoy playing devil’s advocate. What do you think about speech + the iPhone? I’m still curious as to the possible implications of that little speech patent Apple released in December ‘07, and how speech recognition could play a part in the next iPhone, or in its SDK.

Related Stories:
- Apple Prepares iPhone SDK [eFM]

[Image: SiliconValleySleuth]