Aswath points out that speech rec isn’t required in systems that have keyboards, and questions the value of the recent announcement by Skype.
First, we should note that these technology platforms have two components: playout the content stored in a website and recognizing the user’s speech to decide what needs to be played next.
The latter requires an automatic speech recognition (ASR) utility. You need this to be of high quality. This where companies like Tellme excel. This is required if the medium of interaction is the standard telephone. But IM clients like Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger et al. do not require this utility. The customer can easily type in the preferences via the text window rather than speak it and then later interpreted by an ASR.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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Just want to make it explicit that this includes wi-fi phones and even data enabled cell phones as well. Anything to eliminate the interlopers.
More to the point: are these voice services going to be something to "thrill audiences"? TellMe has been around for a few years, has had a few iterations and I have yet to see it go "viral".
A big mistake in launching Voice Services at this time was Skype's failure to provide any operational examples of these services being provided by a third party using Skype. Made it easy for the whole debate to center around the revenue distribution as opposed to what the service provides and how users will accept them.