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!“

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.

***Update: I got someone from TellMe on the phone. Read about their involvement with the iPhone here.***

Sure, March is the holy month for college basketball (FYI – Ryan is a UCLA fan; I’m an MSU girl), but here at Speech Tech, it’s Mobile Month. Even more news today! The sci/tech feeds at Google News are abuzz with stories about Microsoft partaking in the iPhone’s SDK. No big surprise — Microsoft would be silly not to want a stake in the Apple mobility space (and who doesn’t desperately want Excel spreadsheets at all times?). Though most stories report on the integration of the Office suite into the iPhone, a speech tech company, TellMe, is also rumored to be part of Microsoft’s iPhone app projects.

According to a PCWorld blog post, TellMe’s technology could be integrated into iPhone apps –

“Another group at Microsoft interested in the iPhone is from the voice recognition unit at Microsoft featuring the TellMe software that Microsoft recently acquired. TellMe is currently developing voice recognition software for the Windows Mobile operating system, but the iPhone SDK gives plenty of potential for the iPhone route as well.”

Woohoo! Not only is Nuance still on board with Android, but now we may see speech in the iPhone, as well. This also means we have more fuel for news on this here blog — it gives Ryan something to do aside from give us real-time updates about the Sweet 16. Of course, this is all still a gamble. Microsoft has apparently only been looking at the SDK for a few weeks, according to the same PCWorld blog post. Keep your fingers crossed, speech community.

[Photo illustration courtesy of our own Ryan Joe]

I wrote a deployment on speech applications in the warehouse this month but I never really understood how under-the-radar that particular market was until I sat at a lunch table with people from Tellme (a subsidiary of Microsoft, I’m now obligated to mention on pain of death) and Vocollect.

The Tellme people, whose panel on multimodality was one of the most heavily attended, were ALL OVER the Vocollect rep.

It went like this:

Vocollect: We work with warehouses mostly. It’s a pretty niche market.

Tellme: How much do you guys pull in annually?

Vocollect: Around $100 million.

(Thunk of jaws hitting table)

Tellme: That’s a pretty good niche market.

It’s worth noting that the Vocollect rep wasn’t at Voice Search as a speaker (though that makes sense, since his company doesn’t exactly do voice search. On the other hand, neither does Loquendo, which is a supporting sponsor).

Goes to show that some very impressive and useful speech applications don’t get a lot of play because they’re simply not considered sexy by the industry. It’s kind of like high school.