LOS ANGELES–Two forces are creating a market for speaker-independent voice services on the handset, according to one player that believes it is poised to dominate that market.
The convergence of voice, multimedia and Web browsing on handsets has brought renewed emphasis to the keypad as “a massive input barrier,” according to Rich Geruson, chief executive officer of VoiceSignal Technologies Inc. And advancements in memory capacity and processing speed in handsets have opened the door to effective, speech-based functions.
Geruson, speaking at the CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment event last week, said that his privately held, Woburn, Mass.-based firm has 90 percent of the speaker-independent voice-recognition market and will ship on 50 million phones this year.
Granted, that’s about 5 percent of the handset shipments projected for 2006. According to Geruson, however, VoiceSignal is profitable and each year is doubling the volume of handsets bearing the company’s embedded software. Its first deal with a Tier 1 handset vendor–Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.–came in 2002.
“The model here is that within four to five years from now, we’ll be on the vast majority of all handsets sold,” Geruson said. “We’re a company that owns software `real estate’ on the handset. Our `real estate’ and client expertise sets us apart.”
In the broader voice-recognition space, VoiceSignal has competition such as IBM Corp., Fonix Corp., Nuance Communications Inc., BeVocal Inc., V-Enable Inc. and Promptu Corp., according to Dan Miller, senior analyst with Opus Research. But, for VoiceSignal’s speaker-independent niche on the handset, “they’re the dominant player,” Miller said. “Because they’re private, we take them at their word that they’re profitable. To their credit, VoiceSignal did a lot of cajoling with handset vendors to get their footprint on the device itself.”
VoiceSignal just added Palm Inc. to a client list that includes most of the top-tier handset vendors. VoiceSignal’s Treo Voice Dialing application is available now for the Palm Treo 650 and 700p models.
And what’s hot right now, Geruson said, is voice-activated search capabilities.
“`V-search,’ I believe, will be an incredible enabler for mobile,” Geruson said.
Profitable competitors are few to none, he said, and the few aspiring contenders don’t have intellectual property in this space.
The potential for mobile marketing on the handset display, which reflects each step in the VoiceSignal service process, should help attract carrier interest, too, according to Geruson. (Once mobile marketing takes off, that is.)
VoiceSignal has a “multi-modal” philosophy in that it doesn’t intend to displace the keypad or other access technologies, but to simply complement them.
The big picture– Carriers love voice-activation, according to Geruson.
“Research reflects that with each click on the keypad, you lose 10 percent of your customers,” he said.
A typical text message can take 10 clicks to set up and 100 clicks to write, Geruson said.
VoiceSignal’s product has gone from simple command-and-control functions to voice-based Web browsing, speech-to-text and text-to-speech.
It’s based on “hidden Markov model” statistical software, Geruson said.
