Is it game over for other speech tech companies?

Nuance is truly the dominating force in this area and with a partner like Apple, it’s reminiscent of the famed Wintel alliance that still exists today…

Today the company announced its NDEV Mobile program which offers its popular Dragon SDK to multiple platforms: Web-based, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7. Even the lowest tiered NDEV Silver membership will give a developer plenty of access to Nuance’s popular speech technologies.

And NDEV Silver is free. Yup, get ready to see many, many occurrences of people talking to their phones in the coming months…

See Nuance’s press release:

Burlington, Mass. – September 27, 2011 – Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced that its Nuance Mobile Developer Program, now NDEV Mobile, features new services that make it easier than ever for developers to voice-enable apps with Nuance’s industry leading speech technology. NDEV Mobile now features three new service tiers – Silver, Gold, and Emerald – that give developers more choice and flexibility in how they bring Dragon-powered innovations to market. The Dragon Mobile SDK made available through the NDEV Mobile program now also supports Windows Phone 7 in addition to Android and iOS, as well as an HTTP web services interface, and, brings developers eight new languages for voice recognition.

NDEV Mobile has already experienced great success since its launch in January, 2011, with more than 4,000 iOS and Android developers signing on to access the Dragon Mobile SDK across the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia. This success has led to demand for even more flexibility and support in bringing voice-enabled applications to market. As such, NDEV Mobile now features three new tiers of service to better meet the diverse needs of the broader mobile developer community:

• NDEV Silver: NDEV Silver Services provide Android, Windows Phone 7 and iOS app developers with the ability to deploy their apps for free with the accuracy and reliability that only Nuance can provide. Developers will also have free access to Nuance’s connected text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities in over 30 languages, bringing natural sounding read back of text in the cloud. Further, NDEV Silver members get access to Bluetooth use cases and hands-free voice applications.NDEV Silver Services members have access to the world’s highest quality speech recognition technology for both general dictation and search. Additionally, the Dragon Mobile Developer Center provides a centralized resource for speech information and expertise including on-line forums, code samples, and full documentation.
• NDEV Gold: NDEV Gold Services offer access to SSL data encryption, more deployment flexibility and enhanced support. In addition to iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7, Gold Services members can take advantage of Nuance’s HTTP web service interface, which extends the power of Dragon to any mobile device while giving developers greater control over the user interface.NDEV Gold Services members’ applications can take advantage of SSL for encrypted data transmission, as well as open access to analytics tools that will help them maximize the impact and effectiveness of the voice experience their app delivers. Further, Gold Services members have access to one-on-one Nuance assistance in addition to the NDEV Mobile online community resources.
• NDEV Emerald: NDEV Emerald Services are designed to meet the unique needs of NDEV Mobile community members looking for a truly differentiated speech experience on their apps. NDEV Emerald members have an array of customization and service options that bring Nuance’s extensive speech expertise and service capabilities to a diverse developer base – ranging from start-ups to wireless carriers, OEMs, and large enterprises. Emerald Services include custom vocabularies and grammars, user experience consulting, speech integration, advanced text-to-speech, high-availability deployment, and unmatched Nuance support – pre and post deployment, including dedicated account management resources.

Available to all NDEV Silver, Gold, and Emerald members, are eight new speech-to-text languages supported by the Dragon Mobile SDK – Canadian French, Americas Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Taiwan Mandarin, and Cantonese – in addition to already supporting US, Australian and UK English, European Spanish, European French, German, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese for dictation and search. Additional languages will continue to be added through the end of the year, offering developers broader geographic expansion and availability of their innovative voice-enabled apps across the globe.

“The success of our NDEV Mobile developer program has proven that our market-leading voice capabilities drive incredible value for developers across a variety of markets,” said Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager, Nuance Mobile. “Our new multi-tiered services options deliver developers the options and services they’ve been asking for. It’s never been easier to deliver the power of voice-enabled apps to the market, tailored and customized to meet the needs of each app’s unique consumer base.”

NDEV Mobile has voice-enabled some of the market’s most popular apps, including Siri, Price Check by Amazon, Ask for iPhone, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, RemoteLink from OnStar, SpeechTrans, Yellow Pages and AirYell from Avantar, iTranslate, Taskmind, SayHi Translate, Vocre, Bon’App, and many others.

 The Dragon Mobile SDK is available for iOS 4.0 (iPhone/iPad/iPod touch), Android 2.1 and higher, Windows Phone 7.1 and via an HTTP web services interface. For more information about the NDEV Silver, Gold, and Emerald Services, please visit the NDEV Mobile developer portal at dragonmobile.nuancemobiledeveloper.com

Dragon has long been a leading speech recognition application on the desktop, used by millions of people around the world. Nuance has launched an array of Dragon applications across a variety of mobile platforms including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, and more.

To learn more, visit www.nuancemobilelife.com.

Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) is a leading provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers around the world.  Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with devices and systems. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications.  For more information, please visitwww.nuance.com.

Nuance and the Nuance logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States of America and/or other countries. All other company names or product names may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

The statements in this press release relating to future plans, events or services, are forward-looking statements which are subject to specific risks and uncertainties. There are a number of factors which could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those indicated in such forward looking statements, including fluctuations in demand for the Nuance products, and the continued development of Nuance products. The reader is warned not to rely on these forward-looking statements without reservation, since these are simply reflections of the current situation. Nuance disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of developments occurring after the date of this document.

Cisco on the rocks, please

For more photos and videos of Cisco products please visit the album on Facebook.

This year it’s Cisco’s Barry O’Sullivan, SVP Voice Technology Group, who got to lead off Tuesday keynotes. The presentation videos and slides were well done, and the message continued to be about video taking over business interactions. The “video is the new voice” mantra echoed throughout the room. (Interestingly, some may disagree.)

More video means more data. More data means more (or bigger) routers. More routers mean more money for Cisco. Video does have its place in the enterprise, but it’s debatable whether most companies share Cisco’s urgency of addressing the infrastructure needs of video right now. No matter, the bottom line is “when” not “if” video applications will explode in our faces.

I don’t blame Cisco for that marketing message (heck, almost every major exhibitor at the show does it) and O’Sullivan did make some interesting announcements, starting with Cisco Jabber.

Jabber was acquired by Cisco in 2008 — yes, a long time ago. Finally the company is leveraging Jabber to be part of its UC portfolio. In the ol’ days Jabber was used to just do IM, but thanks to standards like XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) Cisco Jabber features video, conferencing, voice, and mobility capabilities. It’s the “buddy list” to end all buddy lists.

Of course, this being the Year of the Tablet everyone was most curious about the progress of the Cius. Well, there was good news and bad news. First, the good news: Cisco aims to reduce the street price from the original $1,000 to $700. The bad news: Cisco has to reduce the street price from the original $1,000 to $700. After all, Apple has set the bar high with iPad (and iPad 2 to come out March 11), both in design and pricing.

O’Sullivan claimed that the company was seeing “unbelievable demand for the device” and said the tablet will become the company’s hottest selling product within a year. That’s quite a bold statement considering Cisco’s product portfolio of mainly routers and switches.

Can I hold it too?

As much as I don’t believe in an “enterprise tablet market,” the Cius does have a couple of differentiators. It has a dock to extend its use as a desktop video phone and also to provide a virtualized PC environment. The tablet runs on Android (not sure which version) and an Intel Atom CPU (commonly found on netbooks), and the demo unit at the booth was still in beta. According to a Cisco representative, work is still progressing to improve stability and optimize battery power.

However, I think the announcement that has the most impact was its new appliances for the SMB segment. Let’s be honest — Cisco products and solutions are often considered too expensive for SMBs. For a good number of years Cisco only paid attention to the large enterprises, but recently it’s shifted its market focus to include small- and mid-tiered businesses. Now Cisco is getting serious about this segment by introducing three products that give business owners a lot of bang for their bucks.

The Cisco UC 320W (under 25 users) looks like a router (even has two antennas sticking up), acts like a router, but is capable of so much more. WiFi (802.11a/g/n), VOIP, unified communications. Setup and administration tasks are easily done via the browser. This appliance can enable UC/IP of a business in 20 minutes or less.

For the slightly bigger enterprise there’s the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition 3000 for 300 users across 10 sites. Again, simple to setup and administer. Something like this could last a long time for a business that’s just starting to grow.

These products, if marketed effectively (for example, reshaping Cisco’s image to be more SMB friendly), could give heartburn to competitors in the SMB space. Make it known to SMB owners that they are also “Welcome to the Human Network.”

The Consumer Electronics Show is soon to begin in Las Vegas, and the break-out product this year appears to be tablet devices. There has to be at least 100 new tablets being announced by the usual suspects (Dell, Acer, Samsung, etc.), but now even television-maker Vizio is entering this market with its VIA Tablet and VIA Smartphone. Most of these are based on Google’s Android, but there are others like HP’s WebOS-based PalmPad, a few Windows 7 tablets, and RIM’s PlayBook.

(Wait — RIM? At a consumer electronics show? Whatever happened to the “business” oriented device?)

The simple truth is, there hasn’t been an enterprise tablet market. When Avaya, Cisco, and RIM announced their tablet plans and showed off the fancy demos, they’re trying to ride the wave created by Apple with its iPad. They’re attempting to do in the enterprise market what Apple had done in the consumer market. Apple now enjoys tremendous first-mover advantage in the overall tablet market share, but the invading Android army is encroaching.

What’s likely to happen is that tablets from Avaya, Cisco, RIM, and maybe even HP, may end up as casualties in the crossfire between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

Companies like Avaya, Cisco, and RIM make their profits on licenses, hardware, and professional services. The telephony servers and data routers are what sells in the enterprise. If they’re trying to sell an “enterprise tablet” priced at near or above $1,000 each, with all the bells and whistles, but partially or fully proprietary, then they better be ready to hear a lot of rejection. Because the iPad and competing Android tablets are gaining traction in the enterprise market already. There’s no stopping the flood of Android tablets at cheaper (consumer- and enterprise-friendly) prices.

Just look back at history as it’s often our best teacher. The automobile industry was once dominated by American automakers like Ford and GM. They’re the first movers. Then came the flood of cheaper, affordable Japanese imported cars. What happened to the American car companies?

Or the boom of the PC industry when Apple reigned supreme until IBM and its clone PCs flooded the market.

The only way to survive is to innovate like crazy, as Apple does, or flood the market, as Google does. Neither has been or can be achieved, in my opinion, by Avaya, Cisco, and RIM.

In essence, it’s not wise for Avaya, Cisco, and RIM to pick fights with Apple and Google. Lose the desire to make an “enterprise tablet” and focus on delivering enterprise apps on existing tablets.

For more coverage of CES 2011, visit my gadget blog at gagagadget or follow @gagagadget on Twitter.

We’ve all interacted with “them” before — speech-enabled machines to help us navigate IVR menus or take us to a customer service representative. You probably spoke to these machines ten years ago, saying the same words or phrases, to achieve the same results. And today you’re still repeating those words, doing the same things.

In other words, what has speech technology brought us?

Thanks to the miniaturization of processing components, speech recognition software now fits in the palm of your hand such as a mobile phone. Both Android and iOS platforms have some built-in speech capabilities, albeit not very refined. Then there are third-party applications such as Dragon Dictation (made by Nuance) and Siri (acquired by Apple) that complements the operating system’s speech capabilities.

There may be renewed interest in speech tech especially in the mobile consumer space. Recently Apple has been recruiting for speech application engineers, speech recognition engineers, and speech research scientists. And they want people who are already familiar with products like Nuance Recognizer, IBM WebSphere Voice, and Google Voice Search.

Apple is known to propel certain technologies into the mainstream. Maybe 2011 will be the year of speech tech, and one day a business will be able to run a speech IVR on the Android platform.

John Stepp, president of Free Tech Consultants, is on the ground in Los Angeles covering ITEXPO West. This is his account of the Sunday night Avaya event, Technology on Tap: Rethinking Design.

At the Avaya event Sunday night in Los Angeles I was fortunate enough to get one on one access with Flare designer Christian von Reventlow, Avaya’s VP of New Products, for a one on one discussion and video.  I must say it was strange doing a video interview with Christian and then later being video interviewed by TMCnet, especially since TMCnet had a huge HD camera with tripod and an interviewer with a microphone and I had a candy bar HD Samsung.  But it was great learning from Christian after his presentation about all things Flare.

There is so much to like about the Flare.  It is Android powered, easy to use, a great UC device and a fantastically designed user interface.  It instantly becomes one of the hottest products for video collaboration and unified communications.  On the heels of the Skype announcement, it also will become a powerful B2C tool for Avaya contact centers in the future.

Christian bought many different collaborators on his product and continues to look for input on next generation Flare (see video).  His team tossed out design after design until they got it right.  By examining a wide variety of products that people love to use, the design team created a template for the design of Flare.

1)    A fun product that brings a smile to the face of the user

2)    A product that fits human ergonomics

3)    A product that is easy to figure out (five minutes or less)

As you can see from the short video, Christian is looking for input from everyone and would welcome any advice.  This fits in with not only with the Android operating system but the spirit of the Android community as well. The Flare will in and of itself sell a lot of Avaya Auras.  The product is a game changer that not only creates a great end user experience, but lends itself to many customizable uses within the enterprise.  A good consultant (hint, hint) could find many things to use the Flare for given a few days of work within an enterprise that would drive excellent ROI to a company’s bottom line and improve communications internally and externally.  The Flare shows that Avaya is moving in the right direction and should bring both excitement and comfort to their Avaya and Nortel installed base.

This guest post is by John Stepp, President of Free Tech Consultants. It’s typed entirely on his Nexus One. Just kidding (but he could’ve).

I know that many are saying that the phone is dead, at least the desktop and landline phone.  If that is the case then why is the mobile world so utterly controlled by the phone?  First people were going crazy to get their hands on the iPhone 4, now many are incensed to find that it has a flaw.  Nobody seems to care much about the revelation that every single iPhone ever shipped has been exaggerating the signal strength of the carrier, AT&T.  No, it is all about the phone.  It is all about the user interface and the user experience.  I understand.  I feel the same way.

When my Nexus One was not perfect and needed to be repaired because of a hardware issue, I had the option of returning it.  Although having calls dropped and having slow data speed was frustrating, I finally decided to just get it fixed.  Just like the Apple iPhone users, I was too enamored with the phone to give it up.  Now that it has the Android 2.2 software on it, the phone is better.  Sure, there is still a dropped call from time to time, but the user interface is great and the data speeds are fast.  Even as the Nexus One is discontinued, CNET tests show that the Nexus One on T-Mobile has data speeds equal or superior to the newer phones.  Whoopi Goldberg was so disgusted with her iPhone 4, she ran over it with her car, but then she went and bought an Apple 3G instead of going to a competitor. The similarity between the Android and Apple infatuation is the great application suites that come with these phones.  From the stunning displays, to the audio/optical communications tools to the immediate access to information, there is much to like.

Gartner recently said that smartphone sales were up almost 50% year over year. And the latest information from ChangeWave Research shows that the next ninety days will have the most explosive growth in smart phones ever with Apple and HTC (Android) leading the way.  However, Research in Motion, the BlackBerry maker favored by most businesses will see its’ market share erode further.  Why are phones that businesses favor in a funk while consumer phones are in such demand that there are now four week backlogs for all the favorites?  The user interface, the phone itself is driving demand and driving change.  E-mail delivery and simple conversations are not enough anymore.  We want pictures, video, social media and immediate access to information.

Businesses will be adapting to this changing landscape on mobility and on the desktop.  Productivity in the workplace will accelerate when the devices employees use in business match that of the devices used in people’s personal lives.  The business telephone and video manufacturers are providing easy to use high value applications for their user interfaces be they computers, netbooks, display phones or video portals.  The future is bright for the companies that decide that the phone (user interface) is everything.  The businesses involved in bringing these “smart” business communications devices to market will grow quickly and sooner than many predict.  And the improved productivity will help businesses grow faster as well, just like the digital revolution did in the nineties.  The phone may morph into many different types of devices, but the future of the phone is as bright as the new displays on the smartphones.

With mobile devices becoming more powerful every day, they are destined to get some serious speech applications. Just do a search for iPhone speech applications. Turin, Italy based Loquendo couldn’t have released its mobile TTS and ASR platform at a better time.

And the company means business in the mobile market, too. Support for iPhone? Check. Support for Android? Check. Support for Maemo (open sourced from Nokia)? Whatever that is, check. Support for Moblin (Intel backed mobile OS)? Yep, check. Support for Android (Google open source, as we all know)? Check! With the exception of the iPhone, the rest are all open source Linux-based operating systems so understandably Loquendo could easily come out with its product to support all of them. (The iPhone OS is based on Mac OS X, and although not open source it still has some Unix lineage.)

I look forward to the day when my mobile phone can serve as an IVR…

Official press release:

Loquendo, leading speech technology provider worldwide, announces that Loquendo Embedded Technologies – ASR and TTS – are now available for OEMs and developers of multimedia applications on the Android, Maemo and Moblin software platforms.

Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. Maemo is a software platform mostly based on open source code. Moblin is an open source operating system optimized for the next generation of mobile devices.

Android is available under a developer-friendly open-source license, which gives mobile operators and device manufacturers the freedom and flexibility to design innovative and exciting products. Recent arrivals to the market include Motorola’s Droid, HTC’s Nexus One, and the soon to be released Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.

According to IDC, shipments of handsets with the Android OS will reach 68m units by 2013, second only to Symbian. Gartner also forecasts that Android, by 2012, will rank second behind the Symbian OS.

Loquendo TTS and ASR seamlessly integrate with the Android platform, offering Java-level interfaces to developers.

Moreover, Loquendo TTS has been integrated into the Text-To-Speech Extended framework: this interface, once installed, makes Loquendo synthetic speech available to any Android app, allowing Android phone users to immediately upgrade to high quality TTS.

On Android, the TTS interface is very simple at the API level, and all functionalities are controlled through Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) tags. By offering a fully-fledged SSML implementation, Loquendo gives application developers full control over its TTS features.

The Maemo platform is built on large parts of open source components, and was developed by Nokia in collaboration with many open source projects such as the Linux kernel, Debian, GNOME, and many more. The Maemo SDK provides an open development environment for applications on top of the Maemo platform. Maemo is based on the Linux operating system kernel – able to support a wide range of different kinds of devices from wrist watches to large server systems, making it ideally placed for the MID (Mobile Internet Devices) and netbook as well as smartphone markets.

With the availability of Loquendo technologies, Maemo developers will be able to unleash the potential of speech in developing voice-enabled apps.

The Moblin platform, short for ‘mobile Linux’, is built around the Intel Atom processor and is an open source operating system for MIDs, netbooks, nettops and embedded devices. The concept behind the Moblin project is to create an operating system specifically designed for netbooks and MID devices by minimizing both boot times and power consumption. The central piece of the Moblin architecture is a hardware and usage-model independent layer providing a single, uniform way of developing such devices. Moblin is based on the Linux kernel.

Early this month, Intel and Nokia announced the merging of Moblin and Maemo into the MeeGo mobile software platform, for which Loquendo will also offer full support.

Loquendo Embedded TTS and ASR are the ideal choice for speech-enabling mobile apps and services, including voice-enabled phones, navigation applications, MIDs, ebook readers, assistive devices, etc.

Loquendo TTS is natural, fluent and highly expressive synthetic speech, while Loquendo ASR is fast, accurate speech recognition even on large-vocabulary, natural-language speech. Both are high-performing, high quality technologies, however compact the device.

Whether on device side or server side, Loquendo offers the same extensive choice of languages and voices, regardless of the architectural solution, enabling service providers to guarantee a seamless service even in mixed environments – where voice content generation is shared across device and network.

Loquendo Embedded Technologies leverage Loquendo TTS mixed language capability, support the TeleAtlas® and Navteq™ SAMPA phonetic alphabets, and are available for all major embedded operating systems: Android, Maemo, Moblin, Linux, iPhone, Symbian OS™ S60, Windows Mobile 5 & 6 (all editions), CE 5 & 6, Windows XP Embedded and Tablet PC ed., VxWorks and QNX.

For more information, or for help and support with your application ideas, please contact Loquendo at: embedded@loquendo.com.

About Loquendo – Vocal Technology and Services
Awarded Speech Industry ‘Market Leader’ for the past three consecutive years, Loquendo provides a complete range of speech technologies for server, embedded and desktop solutions – in 28 languages with 68 voices, and constantly growing – helping businesses deliver a next-generation client experience while saving them millions each year.

Loquendo Embedded Technologies are innovative, easy-to-integrate solutions deployed in more than 10 million mobile and on-board navigation systems globally, as well as powering PDAs, assistive devices, virtual Web-assistants and other embedded solutions around the world.

Loquendo TTS, Loquendo ASR, and Loquendo Speaker Identification and Verification are high-quality, high-performance technologies, also available on the Loquendo MRCP Server and VoiceXML and CCXML platform.

Loquendo is a Telecom Italia company headquartered in Turin, Italy, with offices in the US, Spain, Germany and France, and a global network of partners.

For more info, and to hear Loquendo TTS for yourself, go to www.loquendo.com.

I was pleasantly surprised this afternoon to find out that Google Voice has a brand new web app for the iPhone, and it is a beautiful thing.

Kudos to Google engineers for making such a great looking and usable web app with HTML5:

Today, we’re excited to introduce the Google Voice web app for the iPhone and Palm WebOS devices. This HTML5 application provides you with a fast and versatile mobile experience for Google Voice because it uses the latest advancements in web technologies. For example, AppCache lets you interact with web apps without a network connection and local databases allow you to store data locally on the device, so you don’t lose data even when you close the browser.

It took a while, but I’m glad I didn’t go the jailbreak route just to get a third party native Google Voice app on my iPhone. This web app is very close to the performance and features of a native app.

Are you also a Google Voice user, be it iPhone or Android? Do you think it’s ready for prime time?