Speech recognition technology wins the “the most over-promised and under-delivered of all time award,” according to vlingo Corp. CEO Dave Grannan. But the space may finally be delivering on its promise.
A relative newcomer to the field, vlingo made its first direct-to-consumer play last week with a free downloadable application for BlackBerries. Vlingo for BlackBerry allows users to speak commands into the phone to initiate phone calls, send text or e-mail messages, find contacts or search the Internet.
The offering is available on the BlackBerry Pearl, Curve and 8800 series, and the company plans to support other devices and operating systems later this year.
Gaining traction as free app
The Boston-area startup appeared on the radar earlier this year when Yahoo tapped it to add speech-recognition capability to its oneSearch application. The company hopes to gain traction among smartphone users with free applications and, ultimately, to partner with network operators.
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Vlingo released a new, free application allowing BlackBerry owners to use voice to navigate their devices.
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“We think it’s important to establish a voice user interface in the market,” Grannan said when asked about the company’s business model. “What Apple’s iPhone was to the touch user interface, we want to be for the voice user interface.”
Vlingo’s arrival follows a flurry of big-budget merger-and-acquisition activity in the speech-recognition space in recent years. Microsoft Corp. last year swallowed Tellme Networks in a deal rumored to be in the $1 billion range, and Nuance Communications Inc. appears to have outspent Microsoft in an effort to become top dog in the space. Google Inc. also offers a voice-activated search service, and several smaller players such as V-Enable and Promptu are elbowing for space on the playground.
They’re all vying for a piece of a mobile search market that is expected to take flight in the next few years. The Kelsey Group predicts mobile search will ring up $1.4 billion in the U.S. alone by 2012, and the worldwide market will reach $2.2 billion by that time and keep rising, according to JupiterResearch.
Lack of voice holding back data
And the players are hoping to tap those dollars by offering an alternative to unwieldy phone keypads and menus with more layers than a James Joyce novel. The lack of an efficient, intuitive input system has held back mobile data in general, Grannan opined. Allowing consumers to use their voice – rather than their thumbs – may help fuel the market.
“Frankly, we think the great apps are out there,” he said, “it’s just that they’re hard to use.”
A 2007 study from Usable Products Co. seems to support that theory. The New York-based market research firm tested four mobile search offerings – three text-based services and one voice-controlled application – with 80 consumers allowing users to evaluate each for an hour. While “none of the four search solutions was a clear winner,” according to Usable Products President Scott Weiss, consumers generally preferred talking to tapping.
“Users predicted voice search would be the worst of the four search products, but in final usability, it performed better than expected,” Weiss said. “We were surprised that participants enjoyed voice search, and how much more they liked it than searching via phone keypad.”
And there are indications that consumers are finally warming to such offering after years of disappointing uptake. Nuance’s technology will ship on roughly 200 million devices this year, the company claims, and subscribers of its Voice Control offering – a premium application similar to vlingo’s new product – use the offering more than 60 times a year. While the speech-recognition space for years was plagued by inferior technology and a generally nightmarish user experience, software has advanced to the point where consumers actually prefer interacting with their phones by voice, according to Mike Wehrs, Nuance’s VP of evangelism.
“The trajectory of voice recognition is not too dissimilar to cameras on phones . remember the early ones, where the pictures looked like they were shot by a 3-year-old,” Wehrs said via e-mail. “Fast-forward to today, where you’re starting to see phones with 5-megapixel cameras, better than many point-and-shoots. Voice recognition is on a similar path, both from the standpoint of technologies embedded on the device and services delivered over the network.”
And while Nuance and vlingo are joined by a host of others in the marketplace, the two companies will go one-on-one in the courtroom. Nuance recently filed a lawsuit against the newcomer, claiming vlingo’s service infringes a Nuance patent that covers a technique for adapting voice-recognition technology to users’ specific speech patterns. Vlingo has claimed the suit is without merit.
