Now back in the loving embrace of our New York offices, I thought I’d take a look back at Voice Search and give you Speech Heads out there some final views.

Like all trade shows, there was of course a fair amount of wheeling and dealing-companies ponying up to each other, seeing if they could hew together some kind of symbiotic relationship that would produce some killer solution capable of reaping mega profits. Sort of like a Power Ranger’s Megazord, those giant fighting robots the Rangers had that were made up of various other smaller robots.

In all that hubbub, it was pretty clear that there were three companies that everyone was looking to try and integrate their offerings into: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

There was hardly a minute between sessions I didn’t see Michael Cohen from Google or the gaggle of Microsoft folks not surrounded by eager speech impresarios. Marc Davis from Yahoo, who was only in town for a couple of hours to boost oneSearch at his keynote, was literally deluged by a crush of people wanting to exchange business cards (full disclosure: me too!) before he had to jet back to San Francisco.

The prevailing feeling at the conference, as I described in my last dispatch, was that mobile voice search is  where it was at; that there we would see real and massive growth for speech in the coming years. All heads were turned to giants like Google and Microsoft to lead the way, too. They, many feel, could provide the shake up that speech has really needed.

The field has been kind of limited in scope for the last pack of years. Until late, it hadn’t really expanded too far beyond the places it’s traditionally been found: call centers, command-and-control functionality, and dictation. Without new territory, speech has plugged along without ever seeing explosive growth. With the entrance of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo into voice search, the speech community seems to be excited by the possibilities, and, though they might be reluctant to say it on the record, some of the potential changes in players.

It’s no state secret that Nuance has been dominating speech, acquiring technologies like IBM’s patents, or Philips’ speech, and a slew of others. In the process, as you might find in any aggressive climb to the top, it’s stepped on quite a few toes getting there and has no shortage of discontents. You don’t have to push too hard to get people griping about Nuance in San Diego.

“In a market where there hasn’t been a big brother, [Nuance] rolled up into one,” Joseph Bentzel, chief marketing officer for SpeechCycle and, it should be noted, a competitor, told me. “But in a market where there are bigger brothers doing it for free and virally…” he added before trailing off with half a smile and letting his pause sketch out the possibilities.

While Nuance has cast a large shadow over speech, acquiring its way to the top, building a strong speech provider out of a company that originally just handled OCR scanner software, ScanSoft, Mr. Bentzel thinks it’s reached the end of the line as far as being the undisputed king of speech. By his account, voice search will grow the market and create a space outside of Nuance’s purview.

“Nuance will not exist as a leader in 24 months unless Paul Ricci [Nuance's CEO] reads this article and hires me,” Mr. Bentzel jokes.

Part of Nuance’s problem, as he sees it, is that they’ve tried to become the one-stop solution for all speech needs. They’ve tried to control the process from the ground up, acquiring and integrating technologies into their own banner. This has had the effect of freezing other companies out, and, in some cases, making them hostile.

“This is the Rebel Alliance,” Mr. Bentzel says of Voice Search. “This is the Luke Skywalker Show. We’re on the ice planet and they’ve ignored us.”

While he seems totally at ease comparing Nuance to the Empire from Star Wars, Mr. Bentzel is also quick to say that everyone in speech ought to “thank Paul Ricci for putting speech on the map.”

“I’m not one of these Nuance haters,” he insists. He says he’s more or less agnostic and only sees problems where market growth is impeded, so forget about thinking he views Ricci as some kind of Darth Vader force-choking everyone at the table.

In fact, he suggests that there wouldn’t be much speech out there without Nuance’s drive to make it a big business.

Mr. Bentzel’s position (and others like his) represents an attitudinal shift in how the field has come to view itself. If I, or anyone else for that matter, made the mistake of saying “speech industry,” there were a group of people on hand, just ready pounce, saying, “Speech isn’t an industry, it’s a tool.” Speech is starting to see itself as a subordinate modality to larger functionality, not an end in and of itself the way it has been viewed in its more academic roots.

If you don’t believe me, just try saying “speech industry” for yourself at SpeechTek in August. When you walk into that trap, they’ll whip out that little tool mantra like it were a brand new gun they’d just been itching use and you were the hapless mugger who made the mistake of trying something today.

It’s a crazy mixed up world out there, Speech Heads. Even without the recession, everything is in flux and it seems like everyone is trying something today. Carry a speech-gun and watch your back is my advice.

***SPECIAL NOTE: Due to an oversight entirely on my part, we had erroniously reported that Nuance didn’t have much of a presence at Voice Search. In fact, they did. Brad Bargan, Nuance’s VP of product development, participated in several events. My most humble apologies to them and to our readers.***

The Speech Stars are out at Voice Search in beautiful San Diego. Though somewhat small, there is still a pretty interesting smattering of firms represented, from Microsoft on down to Google—both of whom are notoriously difficult to get on the blower (you better believe I’m doing all kinds of legwork to bring some interviews with them to you guys while I’m here)—on back to players like Loquendo, SpeechCycle, and a bunch of other names more than familiar to our readers. Walking around the marbled halls of the San Diego Marriot and Marina (which looks vaguely like a more sparsely appointed Cheesecake Factory) there are a few things that one can’t help but notice.

One. The total lack of creepy speech-enabled robotics. Despite my brother Adam B.’s crusade to bring attention to this vital and thrilling sector of speech, there is nary a mention of them here in San D. In fact, if you were to ask Bill Scholz, “Where the robots at?” I suspect he’d cock an eyebrow at you and wonder what kind of egregious error he made in granting an obviously deranged psychopath a press-pass.

Still, ever the optimist, I must confess, I hoped to find a Wakamaru speeching up a storm down the conference halls, greeting guests and pointing out where the next talk or demo would be, or perhaps merely subduing attendants with brutal force, applying slave collars to their necks, and forcing them to do humiliating back breaking labor in the robot run salt mines of Tia Juana, just an hour’s drive away. Instead, the toilets—not speech enabled—flush automatically.

Two. This one is a more serious observation about demographics: the R&D end of speech, like most technology fields with it, is dominated by men. A quick scan around any of the conference halls reveals that an overwhelming majority of the faces are middle-aged and bear the marks of Y-chromosomal development. In fact, many of them have facial hair (another interesting trend).

Male dominance of tech, is hardly a novel observation, but being at this conference you get an impression of just how sweepingly true it is. By my own count, there are less women here than fingers you might find on a meat worker in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

Three. Also in the air, but not explicitly on anyone’s lips unless you press them, is the looming sense of what havoc the recession is going to level over Speechlandia. Most everyone is putting on a brave face about their own respective companies’ positions, but when talked to about what they think of the rest of the market they laugh nervously or flash mirthless, uncomfortable rows of teeth in something that only approximates a human smile.

Everyone seems to agree there’s a lot of room for growth in mobile. It’s new, it’s sexy, it’s a way of getting the average six-pack, smartphone wielding Joe using speech in his every day life. That is building a broader market for speech as a whole in the heart of the consuming public. Mobile speech could be like a Trojan horse that gets us all acclimated to speech’s existence and convinces people that we need it every other place we could possibly cram it and gets companies willing to invest in embedding it in their technologies.

Also contributing to the hype of mobile speech growth is the vast pre-existing infrastructure for delivery. Even in the remotest villages of Laotian farmers work the fields with a cell phone clipped at their hip. Everyone has a mobile device and there are untold dollar signs to be swallowed like Pac-Man on a cherry.

I guess that presents a rather mixed picture. Everyone seems to think speech is useful—though that’s preaching to the choir at Voice Search—but they also seem to think that we may just be waiting to see who survives and gets to the other end of this to cash in. Companies without the capital to stay solvent in a credit strapped economy just may not make it on their own.

These are just some preliminary observations about the feel of the conference. Stay tuned for more and hopefully some interviews with speech notables.

Till next time, Speech Heads!

The Voice Search Conference winds down around 5pm tonight, but by then I’m on the flight back to NY.

Another journalist I spoke with said he got all excited when he listened to the opening keynotes, but was inevitably disappointed towards the day’s end due to the overall lack of focus on voice search itself.

I feel similarly; many of the panels didn’t have a lot to do with voice search (and they all could have used more live demos. If you’re going to hawk a solution, I’d like to see it in play). Loquendo’s Paolo Baggia told me during lunch that he was going to give a talk called Improving the user experience.

“It’s not really about voice search, though…” he said.

Both Bill Scholz and Bill Meisel stated in the panels they moderated that they’d defined voice search “very broadly.” To what end? To what extent is it beneficial to have such a vague definition? If you’re going to devote an entire three-day conference to a topic, shouldn’t that topic be clearly defined?

The conference did highlight issues regarding voice search (whatever that may entail). Click below for the rest of the article.

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It’s time for another edition of the Speech Tech blog’s regular feature, “Crushes & Hexes.” Appearing every Wednesday, we highlight companies, places, technologies, or people we deem praise-worthy, or cringe-inducing within the speech/tech/IT world. As always, your feedback is appreciated! Email us at blog@speechtechblog.com if you have a crush or hex item you’d like to see online.

Crush: Voice Search – The Cool Kid on the Block
Why We Love It: According to everyone, voice search is the coolest, prettiest, funniest, most awesome new kid on the block. He will change the way we search on mobile phones, interact with multimedia content, and he’s so all-encompassing that he has his own conference! This March, we’re sending our own Ryan Joe to check out the Voice Search conference in San Diego. OK, it used to be SpeechTEK West, but we’re willing to overlook the name change. Make sure to look for Ryan at the conference, or contact him (rjoe@infotoday.com) if you’re interested in speaking with him during the show.

Hex: Bill Gates
Why We’re Hating: Last month, Bill Gates was heralding speech as part of the Digital Decade (a little bit late, eh?), and this week, he’s causing all kinds of eye-rolling among human rights activists. Why? Because B.G., during a speech at Stanford University yesterday, was quoted as saying:

“I don’t see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet. You cannot control the Internet.”

Oh, really? If that’s so, one blogger wondered, why was Microsoft complicit with the Chinese when the country enforced Internet censorship? Bill, we’re waiting for an answer…

James Dean image [eb.com] & Bill Gates image [tla.ch]