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.

Speech Heads, I don’t know how many of you are also readers of our sister site, DestinationCRM, but if you aren’t you might have missed this little tag-team approach my collegue Chris Musico and I had going on over there. We both covered Microsoft/TellMe’s recent launch of some speech-enabled functionality to their enterprise cloud-based offering.

Chris chatted the distance the venerable Elizabeth Herrell, vice president at Forrester Research, while I yaked it up longtime with the honorable Daniel Hong, lead analyst at Datamonitor, and the results couldn’t have been any more different. While both agreed that IVR was underutilized in the enterprise space, they had divergent views on what Microsoft’s more aggressive pursuit of speech meant for speech big dog Nuance.

While Ms. Herrell seems to think that Nuance better watch its eggs, Mr. Hong sees the releases as less significant and doesn’t think it will make a spit’s worth of difference to Nuance’s nest. Watch the sparks fly HERE and HERE.

“You won’t want to miss this clash of the titans,” says my brother Adam B.