Voice Search "Personal Telephone" Transition

Dec 16, 2008 12:03 PM, MD&D News Staff

The mobile phone is a personal telephone, marking a transition as important as the spread of the personal computer and making it much more than a portable extension of desk telephones, according to Bill Meisel, president of TMA Associates and editor of Speech Strategy News.

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Recognizing this transition but also acknowledging the differences in operating environment between the mobile phone and PC, Meisel and the AVIOS are co-organizers of the second Voice Search Conference scheduled for March 2-4, 2009, in San Diego, Calif.

The conference was established to address the disruptive role of speech recognition, test-to-speech synthesis, and multimodal user interfaces in mobile and Web applications. Since every mobile phone has a microphone and is intrinsically a voice device, the use of speech recognition and text-to-speech for mobile phone applications is expanding rapidly and gaining quick customer acceptance, according to the organizers.

Some speech solutions are network-based, including directory assistance and the rapidly expanding voice search services. The goal of a number of companies is nothing less than to be the dominant way that users interact with their phones, whether to access features on the phone, make calls, dictate text messages, or access network-based services.

The conference emphasizes the business impact of voice search, both in terms of the opportunities it creates for vendors and the resources available to contact centers and service providers to take advantage of the commercial opportunities created. Business models such as ad-supported, pay-by-use, and subscription services will be discussed and contrasted.