Let the beauty pageant begin, Speech Heads!

Perhaps as a warming aperitif to our own 2009 Speech Industry Awards—-now accepting applications—-Voxeo has made Datamonitor’s 2009 “Decision Making Matrix” for the IVR space publicly available on their site.

Datamonitor recognized Voxeo and Genesys as the #1 slammin’ players in the IVR space this year. The two vendors “achieved the highest aggregated scores across technical capabilities, end-user sentiment and market impact rankings.”

Avaya, Cisco, Convergys / Intervoice and Nortel were also highlighted for their strong market presences, technical capabilities, but didn’t score as highly in end-user sentiment. Likewise, Aspect, Holly Connects and Syntellect were runner’ed-up as “viable contenders” with their own “unique strengths.”

The report has far more detailed explanations and considerations of where IVR has been historically and where it seems to be trending. Check out the full results HERE!

Also, if you feel yourself desperate for more speech awards and rankings, be sure to register for SpeechTek where the winners of the 2009 Speech Awards will be unveiled. I know that since we announced that we’d be taking entries, my brother Adam B. has been hyperventilating into a brown paper bag.

It seems like the whole speech industry is just a titter with acquisitions and buyouts these days. The big are getting too-big-to-fail, and the small are getting sucked up like plankton through baleen. Heck, it’s not even the small these days. Just in the last two weeks, we saw Nuance gobbling up patents and licenses from IBM like a fat king on a turkey leg and SVOX gorging itself on Siemens’ speech unit.

Back in December, Roberto Pieraccini from SpeechCycle told me that mergers and acquisitions were happening so fast that even he couldn’t keep track of them.

So far, a lot of the action has been all within the confines of the speech world, but all these acquisitions got me and my brother Adam B. thinking about Japan. So often the Japanese see mergings of the two unlikeliest companies: the Lucky toothpaste company and Goldstar electronics firm to form LG; the Yamaha musical instrument company buying up a motorcycle manufacturer to form the perplexing giant we all know today; or even good ol’ Nintendo, which sold card games in the 60s, but branched out to run a chain of “love hotels” and a cab company.

We were wondering, what if the same happened in speech? What if speech just trounced all over sensible vertical market expansion? What would be some unlikely mergers we’d like to see? Dare we imagine? Yes. We dare.

Behold, Speech Heads! The 2009 Speech Technology Dream Team-Ups:

1.)    Nuance merges with the New Balance shoe corporation to form Nuance Balance.

Nuance will be looking to expand their reach, and this one just made the most horse sense in the world; sympathetic corporate cultures, practically rhyming names, the growing need for a top-rate, speech-enabled shoe corporation. Have you ever been running a cross-country meet and just felt an overwhelming compulsion to dictate your memoirs? Wish away fruitlessly no more. Nuance Balance has a solution for that.

2.)     Avaya acquires Dairy Queen in a hostile take over.

Avaya more or less lets Dairy Queen continue as its own separate brand, but begins incorporating free ice cream into its IVR call-routing systems.

Imagine this, as a caller becomes frustrated with a system, unable to get the service he desires, but rather than being transferred to a domain’s underpaid operator who will likely hand him off to someone else in the domain who can’t help him, he is instead routed to a free and delicious DQ Blizzard—vanilla blended with Oreos! Talk about tasty CRM; that caller has probably just forgotten the outstanding payment he was calling about in the first place. Banking error in this domain’s favor…

3.)    Nexidia buys up the controlling shares of the WWE wrestling corporation.

You know those long-winded monologues wrestlers deliver before a big fight? The ones where they swear to break this, and smash that, and clothesline a fella so hard his ancestors will feel it in organs they weren’t aware they even had? Those little pep talks are all very theatrical and great fun—we know that—but there’s not a whole lot of accountability in them is there? Who knows if the promised pile-driver Macho Man Randy Savage menaced on a Monday Night Raw is delivered to Nature Boy Rick Flair on a Tuesday Night Titans? Well, prepare for a new era of accountability.

In this dream match-up, Nexidia applies its video search tech on-the-fly to WWE events; tagging and tying the pain a wrestler guaranteed outside the ring to his actions in the ring. A ticker at the bottom of your screen lets you know in real time if wrestler Jimmy “The Mouth of the South” Hart is delivering on that smackdown he promised last week.

4.)    SpeechCycle acquires the patent to the Foreman Grill.

Not satisfied with the mixed results of traditional consumer grilling, SpeechCycle decided that it was time to provide world consumers with the grilled food they’ve longed for, at least statistically speaking. Using their data-driven approach, the SpeechCycle Foreman Grill uses aggregated data to provide us with the median steak of our collective dreams.

Just put your dinner in and the grill does the rest. In order to ensure the best results, the device is constantly acquiring data based on a number of metrics. The grill is speech-enabled to recognize utterances like: mmm, tasty, delicious, or ugh, putrid, and This is the most foul meal I’ve known in all my years. If you aren’t satisfied with your meal, don’t blame SpeechCycle. Blame the sum total of human desire.

5.)    PerSay partners with the Cornell University Department of Animal Husbandry.

Looking to patch a number of glaring security problems (the recent theft of several heads of cattle; the spate of sabotage that has hit a number of Cornell’s beasts of burden, including a prize ox; and the vandalism of two dozen carrier pigeons) Cornell gives the Israeli biometric giant, PerSay, administrative control of its department.

PerSay overhauls Cornell’s stable of animals, limiting access to only authorized users who can pass their 96 percent effective voice verification process. After implementation, the department sees a drastic cut in its farm-crime rates; however, some problems do persist. University investigators find that the acts of sabotage were actually being carried out by Animal Husbandry faculty. An inside job! Arrests are made and one, Professor Newman Von Heidleborg, the ring leader, is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Back in New York! Totally forgot that flights from Orlando are always 70%-occupied by small children and screaming babies. The whole flight was like a big tribal gathering, complete with shouting and the sounds of kids playing with their newest toys. Yeah. I’m glad to be back in New York. So, let’s get rolling on what was arguably the biggest presentation at VoiceCon. Cisco wrangled in Al Gore to participate in a live meeting with other panelists via Cisco’s TelePresence product. What is TelePresence? It’s a fancy word for videoconferencing! Gore was in Nashville, Cisco president & CEO John Chamber was in California, and there was also a British reporter in London involved. Each of these panelists was projected on to a TV set in the VoiceCon keynote room. Three big talking heads in one room! It was hard to contain my joy.

All criticism aside, Cisco gets major props for doing something the other keynotes didn’t — they not only showed how their technology worked, but tied it in to their presentation’s title, “Climate Change and Technology Innovation.” Rather than fly all three panelists in to Orlando, they saved major bad-carbon by using TelePresence to conduct the panel. The picture was extremely clear, never broke up, and it was easy to hear everyone. A little piece of my cold, black heart melted. The company’s main point: using videoconferencing not only saves travel expenses, but allows a company to use technology as part of a green initiative. Nevermind the fact that one session I attended said videoconferencing creates the “appearance” that your company has a green program (the “appearance” — surely you can do better than that).

So, major ups to Cisco’s Sue Bostrom for being one of the most well-spoken presenters at VoiceCon – she was also the ONLY female keynote speaker – and gave a clear speech without sounding like a well-trained robot. You go, girl. An illustrated wrap-up follows after the jump!

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Greetings from the Orlando Airport! I’m wearing black clothing (anticipating cold NYC weather), but 99 percent of the people here are dressed like they just stepped out of Epcot. Also, lots of fanny packs. Anyhow, VoiceCon ended today. Though I wanted to live-blog every day, I was unable to do so for a few reasons: my MacBook was set on “better performance” and my battery kept dying; the conference’s free WiFi network always gave me only ONE BAR during sessions and keynotes; and I was busy every day from 730 am – 830 pm (usually, the people at VoiceCon looked at me like I was insane for staying that late, and kicked me out). So, yes — mini-traumas aside, I enjoyed the conference.

Usually, I’m holed up in the Speech Tech, sucked into the world of ASR, IVR, TTS, STT, ACD, and VUI. This time, I got to check out some UC solutions that will have a real impact on the contact center space. The biggest issues in UC/VoIP? Interoperability, integration, tons of “strategic partnerships.” I was reminded of Forrester analyst Brian Haven’s keynote speech at Nuance Conversations at several VoiceCon keynotes. The message from both speeches was the same: companies need to wise up to their changing consumer and employee demographics — and, with a plethora of information available at one’s fingertips, the enterprise must adapt and embrace the changing nature of business relations. This extends past presence and UC/UM sessions; it also penetrates the contact center and overall IT infrastructure. Head geeks, unite — VoiceCon was all about you. Read on for some of my favorite sessions’ highlights…

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I’m writing this from the first annual Voice Search Conference in San Diego. I’m also banging this stuff out real quick-like so I apologize in advance for any slovenliness of form and grammar. Additionally, the chambermaid at the Chateau de Marriott is battering the door because she insists my bed needs to be made and mints strewn lovingly across my pillow. All very distracting.

In the meantime, some scattered thoughts:

- First, somebody really needs to come up with names distinguishing voice-powered search versus audio mining (there’s ambiguity because both are often labeled “voice search”) This convention, based on the opening keynote (which I covered in today’s Speech Tech news) and the titles of upcoming panels, focuses pretty much on voice-powered search. There is a panel tomorrow called “Searching Audio/Video Sources On The Web And In Enterprises” that I will attend. Though so far, it looks like the only panel dedicated to audio mining.

- Given the great potential for audio mining (i.e., more accurate multimedia searches, targeted advertising, etc), it would be nice to see greater representation. Of course, the convention just got started, so if I’m wrong, I’ll be sure to post a picture of myself devouring a crow [We hope so -Ed.].

More on Ryan’s [mis]adventures, after the jump. (more…)