PODCAST: Nuance Exec Reveals Voice-Activated Mobile Search Ambitions; Which Apps Will Fly – And Why ?
Nuance Communications is certainly a company on the move – wrapping up a string of recent acquisitions and taking the wraps off a slew of new offers. Recently, Nuance took a giant step in the direction of offering location-based mobile search, when it introduced its Voice Control one-click mobile search and messaging service for Blackberry smartphones with built-in GPS. The app is the first to use natural speech as an input mechanism, and allows users to conduct location-based business searches (via 411 directory assistance in the U.S.) and receive driving directions using their voice. (More in this release.)
I caught up with Peter Mahoney, VP of Worldwide Marketing for Nuance, just prior to this to get the inside track on Nuance’s recent acquisitions, its bigger-picture plans for mobile search and his personal vision for voice-activated apps moving forward. His take: Voice technologies may not be perfect –yet – but they don’t have to be. Their value prop isn’t about recognizing every spoken word; it’s about their ability to process voice in voice-in, text-out multimodal mobility scenarios. Translated: The real business opp is around mobile search, user-gen content and blogging apps that use voice as an input and deliver text to user’s mobile device displays. My thanks to Peter, who was forthcoming with straight answers to straight questions- and even gave us a look at some stats the company otherwise keeps under wraps.
Listen to the podcast here. [21:48]
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The Tegic ingredient: Nuance has sharpened its focus on mobile speech apps and mobile search, doubling its investments in the technologies are going to be a part of our mobile lives and the way we interact with devices. The planned acquisition of Tegic communications, the content discovery arm belonging to AOL, is part of a larger strategy to “support all sorts of input modalities and …improve the overall user experience by optimizing the input modalities across speech to touch to text and everything in between.” (More in this release.) The aim is to deliver an all-in-one interface that integrates Nuance and Tegic solutions to support predictive text, speech and touch input. No secret that Nuance also has its eye on the prize: the iPhone opportunity.
Trick or treat?: How does the tie-up between Tegic and Nuance function from the user perspective? “As an example, if you’re using something like T9 or XT9 which is the intelligent content discovery application, you know that as you start entering in text, it’s going to whittle down quickly a very specific list of things that you’re likely looking for. That kind of experience paired with speech input might provide a better result [set]. As a user, you want the experience of looking for content to look and feel the same and sound the same no matter what modality you happen to be using at that given point in time. So, from a usability perspective, it’s quite important and we do think there are some interesting tricks – that we can’t tell you about yet –that we can use to make the overall experience more effective and more accurate.”
Music to our ears: Nuance has a business relationship (not a formalized partnership) with white-label mobile search and advertising provider JumpTap. “We’re providing a music search technology capability that other people can use to deliver and provision music search services…. The exciting thing about the announcement is that we have been able to pull together a solution that supports very large catalogues that are associated with music search services. We’ve got well over a million titles going in our demo database right now, and it’s very scalable based on all of the voice search technology that we have, so we believe we can support virtually any size music catalogue that people can put together with voice search, which we think is very important especially as we’re getting more mobile phones, notably with the i-Phone release, capable of playing MP3s at the same time.”
Stats speak volumes: Some insight to mobile search usage and behaviour based on the take-up of Nuance’s Voice Control service offered by Sprint in the U.S. “If you looked at this service when it launched back 6 months ago or so, we built up to an average use of about 28 or 29 searches a month on the network. We’re now seeing that grow up to about 45 or more per user searches a month.” For Peter it’s a “great indication that the real barrier to search was usability and by making it really easy for people we think it’s really going to take off.”
Is local where it’s at? : Very definitely! But there’s also a lot of value to be extracted from services that harness voice to navigate content – period. “It’s about adding our utility to something that can be [presented] as a billable service, and we’ve seen from our numbers that people really accept it.”
To recap:Voice can power a lot of apps – and the industry needs to look beyond just mobile search and mobile location. They are exciting opportunities – but it’s also tough to put a price tag on what a voice recognition company brings to the table. What’s more, the monetization models around voice-activated mobile advertising and mobile search are in a confusing state of flux.
Nuance “gets” this and is therefore gearing up for the day when voice by itself is a form of mobile content. Two apps on his radar: navigation and dictation. “Nuance Voice Control supports a broad set of applications including the ability to do short email dictation, but combining that with some of our open-ended broad dictation technology will allow people to not only do short email dictation, but …complete very long, open-ended dictation on their mobile devices for everything from email communication to mobile blogging. We think – because consumers are so focused on content creation these days – it’s a great opportunity.”
