What if your company gets verbed

Everyone knows what it means to xerox a printed page. A printed page is reproduced on a thermographic sheet of paper. It also implies less directly that the copy is highly accurate and done with a miminum of fuss. Likewise, Fedexing a package means shipping it to a location for delivery the next day. It also implies that the sender can be sure the package will arrive on time. If you're asked to Fedex something and you send it USPS and it doesn't get there overnight, you may find yourself in some trouble. Everyone is probably familiar with the verb "to google."

Verbs are the words for actions, and we can't do without them. To eat, to sleep, to talk, are all things that we have to name because the concepts they capture are so necessary to our lives that we have to call them something. Nouns come and go, especially company and product names. Xerox and Fedex created functions in the business world that have become so necessary that we can't imagine operating without them. In the 1970's the idea that you could ship a package anywhere and guarantee 24 hour delivery was considered ridiculous. Now we expect to be able to Fedex anything anywhere in 24 hours. Need to move 24,000 sea turtle eggs from the Florida gulf coast to the east coast ahead of an oil spill (or "BP'ed")? Just Fedex them.

These companies were rewarded for their status in the business world by having their company names verbed. Other companies may provide a service that fulfills the function, but the verb adopted to name the action comes from the company that invented and fulfilled the service.

So, if your company name was verbed by your customers, what would it mean? Would it mean providing a unique and necessary function with high reliability and outstanding customer service? Or would it mean something else? What would you want it to mean? Do this exercise. Come up with a definition of the intended meaning of your company's verbed name. If you can do that, you just wrote yourself a mission statement.

Official Google Blog: Goodbye to an old friend: 1-800-GOOG-411

Google will shut down its speech reco application GOOG 411. I had written about this service before. I don't have a smartphone, and this was a handy service when you were away from your computer. Google rarely hesitates to pull the plug on a service that isn't meeting expectations, so I guess this is no exception. Thanks to Phillip Hunter for alerting me to this story.

Google Voice

I signed up for Google Voice a few days ago. Based on what I've seen so far, it has potential. You get a free phone number and a few services that you might find handy. Call routing to other phones based on incoming number ID, spam filtering on unwanted numbers, and speech to text that sends voice mails to email. I assume they're not using CSRs in call centers to provide the transcription. There's a free SMS feature but I haven't tried it yet. Pretty nice.

Even if you only use the free phone number, it's nice to have. You have complete phone number portability, since you can forward all calls to whichever phone you'd like. Don't care for your current mobile provider? Get a new one, and forward your calls there. Customers' switching costs are essentially zero now, as long as they don't abandon their current provider before the end of their contract.

Google has real plans for voice. This is another market they're going to fight over with Microsoft.

Google voice search

Google's voice search capability is available on the iPhone. Based on this review, it appears to work well. "Works well" could mean a number of things, though. It could mean "the recognizer works well" or "it finds a lot of interesting stuff" or "it helps me do things I really need to do." The last criterion is really the important one. It's the thing that will draw people to use the service frequently, and perhaps generate revenue.

Readers' reactions to the app is really interesting. Most of the reactions are pretty positive, but a few people registered complaints. If you work with speech reco technology you know that the underlying language model is based on North American English. You realize that it doesn't work as well with people who are sick with colds. But the readers didn't cut the app any slack for those things, and that's important to remember for people who are delivering speech apps. Users' expectations are already pretty high for speech reco, and this will make it even higher.

Gmail voice and video

Sometimes Google thinks big by thinking small. It has added video and voice chat to Gmail. Very cool. It's just another way to stay in touch with friends. It's also a compelling reason for people to insist that their friends get a Gmail account if they don't already have one. This feature, when used with Google docs, even gives people a very inexpensive video conferencing system.

Microsoft and voice search

I read two apparently unrelated news items about Microsoft recently. The first was its acquisition of Powerset, a natural language search engine for retrieving information from Wikipedia. One Microsoft blogger explains the logic of the Powerset acquisition.

The second item was released by Spinvox, a speech-to-text transcription engine that can be adapted for a number of applications. This news release, which hasn't been commented on much, said that its new senior director for its Microsoft relationship will "charged with driving the co-development of Microsoft unified communications and enterprise applications with SpinVox services." So Spinvox is going to co-develop apps with Microsoft.

If you put these two technologies together, speaker independent speech-to-text and natural language text search, you would have a pretty powerful way of searching Internet content from your mobile phone. Powerset, in particular, still needs some work, but it exists as a proof of concept that you can use natural language to get answers from large text corpora.

Microsoft has been challenging Google on search presented visually, so far without much success. These two recent developments could signal Microsoft's attempt to create a market for voice search.

Volunteer to help colonize Mars

Google is offering everyone a chance to help colonize Mars. You can even take a psychometrically validated personality test to see if you'd be a good candidate to join the mission (If you've read my early posts you know what a fan I am of personality testing for personnel selection).

I wonder if it's significant that this item was posted on April Fools Day. Naah. I'm sure it's completely legit.

More GOOG 411 - call recordings

Here's an interesting item about 800 GOOG 411: Google is recording calls for the purpose of improving its application's performance. I've blogged about GOOG 411 before; the service is a simple way to find phone numbers of businesses in any area of the country.

There's nothing unique or objectionable about recording speech samples in order to improve your application performance. Nearly anyone who uses speech IVRs probably wishes they would work better than they do. The article that I linked to quotes Google's plain language privacy policy, stating that Google is recording calls, and-for good measure-collecting ANIs in order to "personalize" the caller's experience. The article goes on to state that the recordings are used for "phonemic analysis" and "voice prints," and conjures an "Orwellian" scenario out of this information.

Whoa. Let's take a breath here. Recordings of interactions between a caller and an IVR don't necessarily mean that they're being used for "phonemic analysis." I listen to recorded calls all the time as part of tuning exercises to improve an IVR application's performance, but there's no "phonemic analysis" involved. And as far as storing voice prints, for the amount of speech that GOOG 411 requires for a search, it would be a pretty ineffective way of collecting a voice print. Not to say that it couldn't be done, but it's not the way voice prints are usually collected.

There's no doubt about one thing: people get very concerned over voice prints and other types of biometrics. I've conducted research on consumers' perceptions of voice prints and what it takes to get people to trust the technology enough to use it. There is genuine mistrust of biometric technologies that companies who employ biometrics need to deal with.

However, I can't find any reference to voice prints in any of the information provided in this article. The author read "recordings" and thought "voice prints." If that's a typical response from a customer to a "calls recorded for quality" announcement, then we all need to do some serious customer education. If Google is, in fact, collecting voice prints, I'd sure like to know how they are doing it.

800 GOOG 411

I tried Google's speech application for finding business phone numbers. I successfully found a business in Boulder, CO, in my first attempt. I'd need to work with it more before I passed judgment on how functional it is. What I found remarkable is the presentation. Here's the initial greeting.

"Calls recorded for quality. GOOG 411 experimental. What city and state?"

It's quick and businesslike. No effort to be cute or fancy. Let me be the first to say (at least I'm think I'm the first) that Google has apparently tried to capture the visual presentation of its web page in an auditory presentation. It succeeds. Its web page is just a white page with a logo, an input box, two buttons, and a small number of links. If you were trying to translate that visual presentation into a VUI you couldn't do a better job than Google has.

By being simple and almost terse, Google created a unique, differentiated experience. If its speech browser's performance is as good as its web site, it will have a winner.