Nuance has announced the results of its “I Speak Dragon” contest, Speech Heads—a contest aimed at asking Dragon users to tell the company how the software has successfully impacted their lives. The awards were given in five categories: educational, personal, social, professional, and legal.

The winners Mike Fejes, a public school teacher; Bob Bieber, a sufferer of rheumatoid arthritis; Ronald W. Banks a psychologist; Shirley Bowman, an alternate media specialist; and attorney Judy Chorlog don’t, as you can plainly see, include me or my brother Adam B.

Adam has taken it particularly hard. He is totally unresponsive to our pleas. He’s just repeatedly slamming his head into the desk.

A Nuance spokesperson has tried to soothe us by telling us that there were nearly 1,000 entries this year from across the company’s customer base, but Adam is inconsolable.

“How could I have made better, more life changing, more positive. use of Dragon? Just tell me! How?” he rages at no one in particular. Our editor has been all choked up himself. He can’t even meet Adam’s eyes when he walks past our desks on his way to the water cooler.

To find out how Adam could have used Dragon better himself, check out the winners from Nuance.

Speech Heads, if you caught my brother Adam B.’s article today, Nuance has acquired Jott for an undisclosed amount.

The deal is apparently a month old, and was only announced after a web page from Ackerly Partners, one of Jott’s investors, noted that the deal had been made in June. From there, according to Brier Dudley’s Seattle Times blog, the news burbled up on TechFlash.

The acquisition, however, signals that Nuance is serious about its place in the mobile space. As we’ve reported before in our review of Nuance’s voicemail-to-text offering, VM2T, and subsequent articles, the company’s entire business proposition is OEM and carrier-facing. Nuance has not made direct-to-consumer plays, letting its partners—many of them already big household names—face the public with their offerings. Jott, by contrast, makes direct-to-consumer bids.

Given all the fanfare about carrier deals from some of Nuance’s competitors, the acquisition of Jott has gotten some thinking that this might be a shift in direction for Nunace. Not so, though, says Mike Thompson, senior vice president for Nuance Mobile.

“Our primary customers are operators, OEMs, and enterprise organizations. That’s who Nuance sells software applications and services to, and that will continue to be the highest priority,” he says.

He adds, however, that Nuance does “do consumer work for a variety of reasons in certain parts of our business. Being very close to consumers allows for rapid innovation and lots of interesting things that you can learn.”

He also asserts that the purchase of Jott is not a reactive gesture to happenings in the mobile market at all, praising its new property as being strong and innovative. Nuance has no plans to scrap Jott’s direct consumer customers, nor have its strategy do an about face. Rather, it plans to build on Jott’s strengths with its own.

“As a small start up, Jott’s strategy was selling direct to consumers,” writes Datamonitor associate analyst Aphrodite Brinsmead in an email to Speech Technology. “Nuance will continue to support and target customers directly but its key focus will be in gaining carrier relationships. Carriers have a large, diverse user base and the ability to bring speech-to-text to many new customers.”

She points to Jotts offerings like Jott Assistant which handles voice reminders, texts, emails, etc. as value that Jott brings to Nuance.

“Nuance will gain a stronger position against growing competitors, such as SpinVox and Google Voice, by adding extra features like these to its service,” Brinsmead says. “Nuance is ramping up its mobile portfolio and aims to automate all mobile interactions with speech.”

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?

Well Speech Heads, this was a long time coming, but here it is! OUR SPINVOX REVIEW!

Some ground rules before we begin:

Pussyfootin’ Provisos and Liability Claims

Trial Version

The SpinVox service I was using was a trial version. It basically worked through call forwarding, sending all my missed calls to SpinVox for transcription and using a third-party aggregator to send them back to me as texts/emails. If I wanted to listen to the messages, I had to call SpinVox directly. When you use SpinVox natively, the service works through a carrier’s existing channels. So for the most part you don’t feel its presence as much as I did.

SpinVox v. Nuance

Doubtlessly, this review will draw some comparisons to our Nuance VM2T review. The devious of you out there will be trying to piece together which one I think is better. Sorry to disappoint, I won’t be coming down with any definitive pronouncements on that count. I’m afraid those betting stubs you bought are going to be worthless.

For the purposes of our blog product reviews we’ve very purposefully eschewed using any kind of numerical value system-in part because that system is just untenable long term for the blog. Technology will change and, moreover, numbers can be used to suggest comparisons between features that we never intended to compare. For a lot of the same reasons, when we do the Speech Industry Awards (SpeechTek 2009, HOLLA!) we have our judges rate vendors overall rather than dealing with thickly overgrown forest individual products.

Furthermore, for the purposes of this Thrilla in Manila: VM2T v. SpinVox, the two are only comparable so far. Like with SpinVox, when I test drove the Nuance service it was just a demo version that didn’t actually deliver texts to my phone. I don’t really have a great feel for the ins and outs of delivery times or the niceties of interface of either. Given that, the only point of comparison between the two that one could feasibly draw is between the respective engine’s recognition accuracy.

The Equipment

Another disclosure: the mobile phone used throughout this review was a Samsung SCH-U540. My phone, pictured here can be described as pretty much the featurest of feature phones. This phone is so feature, and this is not a joke, that when I was talking to a vendor about usability tests on mobile devices, they told me they test on a “full gamut of phones.” At the high end they tested their software some suped BlackBerry, probably capable of fielding a line drive while processing six terabytes of cancer research, and on the low end, they used a phone that the guy called, “as nothing as you can probably get.” The low phone in question? My exact phone.

So bear that in mind when you read through.

And now…

The Review:

Delivery and Some First Results

One of the immediately cool things I noticed about the service is that when I got a message it appeared as a text from the number that called me. Other than “spoken through SpinVox” appearing at the end of each message, they looked exactly like a text from the caller. That makes it really easy to call or text somebody back without having to dig up their number or dial anything. And hey, if the number is in your address book, you’ll know who it’s from before you even crack the message open. Beats cycling through a bunch of messages you have no need to hear, no? Special added bonus, you can also set up your SpinVox account to send a copy to your email!

There were, however, some issues that I encountered in my use of the service. One was with the delay in delivery of messages. How fast they made it from utterance to text seemed to vary anywhere from a couple minutes to as many as fifteen. Some were also dropped while others were delivered in random chronological order. I don’t know how much I can attribute this to my own carrier’s network or SpinVox, but I can provide an example of where things went wrong. (more…)

If you’ve caught today’s news Speech Heads, Mike McCue, co-founder of TellMe will be leaving the company come June.

It seems like all the news is coming up TellMe lately. If you’ll remember, last week we reported on some conflicting analysis on the significance of Microsoft/TellMe’s release of new in-the-cloud solutions. At contention between analysts Daniel Hong (of the Datamonitor variety) and Elizabeth Herrell (Forrester-flavored) was whether Microsoft was poised to really pose a threat to Nuance.

Whether or not that’s true, Nuance seems to be feeling some pressure from the TellMe/Microsoft tag team.

I was cleaning out my email and I noticed the following email blast from Nuance’s PR folks that came in a couple weeks ago:

“Today’s announcement is simply Microsoft looking to get back on the mobile industry map.  Their product is not only limited to Windows Mobile handsets, but just to those running the new 6.5 version of the OS.  Nuance Communications has long been offering these capabilities to all major OEMs and carriers with VSuite and NVC 2.0 for virtually any platform—smartphones and feature phones.  That’s why owners of more than 300 million phones worldwide—-from major OEMs such as Motorola, RIM and Samsung—-already enjoy one-button access to voice-enabled features with Nuance’s VSuite.”

“Today’s announcement” refers to an April 29th story that saw Windows Mobile 6.5 getting speech recognition courtesy of TellMe. I know this by no means new news, but I thought it might be good to illustrate the context in which last week’s piece was couched.

It’s not that often that you get a release from a PR agent about another firm. This rare tactical move on Nuance’s part  suggests some genuine concern. Most of the time a company will just let another’s announcements lie. Perhaps there is a fear that if speech goes native in the Windows Mobile OS, they will have a harder time convincing OEMs and carriers to pay to embed Nuance speech in their devices.

As we’ve reported before, Nuance’s entire business model in the mobile space is carrier/OEM facing. They move their wares through deals with companies like Motorola and Samsung rather than making any direct-to-consumer bids. If Windows viably threatens that model, it may put Nuance in a very precarious position on the mobile front.

When I asked my brother Adam B. what he made of all this Nuance on Microsoft/TellMe huff n’ puff, he only growled throatily, “It’s clobberin’ time!“

Today, The New York Times reported that Amazon’s Kindle 2 much vaunted text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities, provided by Nuance Communications, came up short when trying to pronounce President Barack Obama’s name. The device uttered something closer to Baah-raah-k O-baah-maah (closer to the sounds in “black” and “Alabama,” the Times said. The paper adds that the problem has since been corrected. Obama’s name has added to the Kindle’s TTS dictionary and will be included in the next wireless update.

The Kindle TTS misfire came to prominence as many news organizations began openly speculating on whether subsequent versions of the Kindle could create a viable non-paper-based means of distribution. Wired, for instance was running the headline “How the Next Kindle Could Save the Newspaper Business” in stories about partnerships the The New York Times and Washington Post were looking to hatch, while mediabistro.com pondered, “Can The Kindle Save Newspapers?” Whether any of that’s true, the failure of Kindle’s TTS to pronounce things like the President’s name correctly may put at least a temporary crimp in any role speech might in any Kindle paper-saving venture.

When it comes to that though, don’t blame Nuance. (more…)

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.

Speech Heads, after many a voicemail message and perilously rigorous scientific testing, we’re finally ready to give you STBlog’s assessment of Nuance’s VM2T (voicemail-to-text) client.

How the review breaks down

A couple weeks ago, I had a briefing with Nuance Communications about setting the service up where they explained the lay of the land. They explained that version I would be testing is a little bit different from the one you’ll find out in the wilds of market. As we’ve mentioned before, Nuance’s marketing strategy with VM2T is to distribute through its partners–in this case carriers. Nuance provides the underlying technology to its partners, but each iteration is likely to look a little different according to those partners’ needs. The version I was using was hosted directly by Nuance, so interface specifics probably wouldn’t bear any relation to what most end-users will see.

For one, I had to set up a forwarding service to use it which an end-user would never have to do. For two, all of the messages were emailed to me rather than sent as text messages. In real deployments, Sean Brown, product manager for mobile applications at Nuance, assured me the messages will be sent as SMS texts under most carriers. Also varying from provider to provider are settings for live agent intervention. Depending on what a provider wants to pay for/provide they may bring in real people to clean up the texts if a message scores low-confidence.

All that said, the recognition engine (Dragon 10) is identical to the one that carriers will be using, so we focussed on that for the purposes of this review.

The process began when I set up my account, dialing a number that would, from that brave moment on, forward all my voicemails past my provider’s system to Nuance VM2T HQ. There, they’d be subjected to pinch-and-pull of Nuance’s automated recognition, possible human oversight depending on the strength or weakness of  confidence scores, and spat back out to my email as a text with a .wav of the message attached for review. If the system was unable recognize what was said, it would be indicated this with [...]. Likewise, if it didn’t have high confidence and guessed a word it would write [?] after it.

The results

(more…)

Yesterday, my Speech Brother Eric B. and I were thumbing through some of the Obscure Speech Periodicals that we read in order to bring you the very latest and greatest in Speech News.

And that was when we came across something we thought was Too Good To Be True.  Sadly, we were correct.  It was a prank.

But then I said: “A lack of relevance has never stopped us before, so why start now?”

And then Eric B. said: “Yup-Yup, Buttercup.”

And so we at Speech Tech Blog are proud to introduce you to the totally fake Shocking Speech Recognition Wristband.

Basically, it’s a wristband with a microphone that you can train to recognize when you use certain “crutch” words–like multimodal, embedded solution, hosted service, sausage.   After training it, you slide the band onto your wrist and it gives you a reminder–a small electric shock–when it hears you use a blacklisted word.

Wow!  What a great use of Speech Technology.  This product simply needs to be real.

We don’t usually do this, but today I will break the rule:

I am issuing a Formal Challenge to Nuance to make me a Shocking Speech Recognition Wristband.

You have two weeks.

That is all.

Yesterday, the Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) provided analysis of a joint study between Harvard University and Warwick University. The results, they suggest, put a damper on the unspoken implications of a 2008 Nuance study that found using speech recognition was safer than using tactile controls.

The Harvard/Warwick study, which had a quick rundown in Wired magazine last December, found that “The worst results came from the subjects tasked with listening to a list of words and then speaking new words that began with the same letters as each word on the list. Those ‘drivers’ had a 480 millisecond delay, which at 60 miles per hour would mean 42.3 additional feet traveled before applying the brakes.”

This, GLG extrapolates this to mean that voice command-and-control will have similar results.

“This task is similar to using an in-vehicle system for command and control purposes.  The driver is speaking to the system and then waiting for [its] response and possibly speaking again,” it writes.

It’s quick to add, however, that speech interactive systems often offer shortcuts and reduce the amount of time require to engage with them, possibly mitigating some of the risk.

It should also be noted that these results seem to collude with a AAA study we reported on last month on the main site, that concluded that the danger to drivers in using wireless devices was not primarily the use of their hands, but the use of their cognitive attentions. Where strict safety is concerned, really drivers shouldn’t even been listening to music, much less doing anything more complicated.

The conclusion that GLG comes to is that voice command-and-control while safer are not safe. It suggests that Nuance’s report has some limitations. This isn’t the first time it’s questioned the 2008 report. In July of 2008, GLG questioned the significance of the sample size, thirty participants, and how accurate a study in an artificial simulated scenario would be in the real world.

Perhaps somewhat derisively, it writes,“Nuance recently released the results of a study that claims to “prove” that speech recognition used in-vehicle while driving increases driving safety. I’m sure that the results of the study are right, to the extent that Nuance is releasing any data and conclusions.”

Responding to the concerns raised by GLG in yesterday’s analysis, Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager of Nuance Mobile, says, “The results of last year’s study demonstrated that speech-powered systems in vehicles help reduce driver distractions posed by manually entering information into navigation systems, entering music selections via mp3 players, making and receiving phone calls, and so on.  Clearly, the safest option is for drivers to simply refrain from using these devices and applications, but for those who insist on using them, the study showed that a hands-free, eyes-free option provided by speech is the next best alternative.”

Perhaps, Thompson is right. Who, for instance, is going to forgo listening to music in the car? On the other hand, one might argue that it isn’t enough for any manufacturer, developer, or even person to take morally neutral stands, reconciling ourselves to saying people oughtn’t do it, but we may as well make it safer. That’s perhaps too easy an answer. But then, what can you do? If Nuance doesn’t do it, some might say, someone else will, and then they will have ceded important business ground, really the existential foundation of their entire venture into automotive work. If there is a demand, are companies responsible first to some arguably tentative moral stand (after all who is authorized to make decisions for people unilaterally?) or the market?

And there is a market. My brother Adam B. for instance, will never stop using speech in the car. He moonlights as a NYC cabdriver–one of the 5% of cabbies in the City without a driver’s license I may add. His cab is so speech-enabled that it won’t even start unless he politely says “Good morning, Mackie”– Mackie’s the cab’s name.

For dangerous speech-enabled drivers like him, there’s just no reformin’.