Nuance + IBM speech technology

Here's one that got by me for a few days. Nuance and IBM announced a plan to combine IBM's speech technology with Nuance's. I've blogged previously about IBM's effort to get competitive in speech technology. One of their research managers had said that IBM was working with partners like Vlingo and others, but there was no mention of Nuance.

This is interesting. It seems to signal that IBM has some good technology but no good idea of how to market it. So, it was over to Nuance to bring IBM's technology to market. That's too bad. I was hoping that IBM speech recognition could provide a challenge to Nuance. I don't see that happening now.

IBM's Next Five Big Things

This press release from IBM claims that speech recognition for the Web will be a hot technology within five years. As I mentioned previously, IBM has been dedicating some effort to speech recognition. It's a nice idea, I'd like to see it happen, but it's usually a good idea to be skeptical of claims for any speech recognition application.

Here's a slicker presentation on the material in the press release, with a little different spin. The "web" use would be for automatic speech translation, apparently. Automatic translation has been a dream for decades, and in fact it's one of the original AI research projects. I'd like to get a chance to talk to someone in IBM speech research about this.

Improving productivity by automating management

The book The Numerati by Stephen Baker has generated a little buzz. It's about companies' efforts to model human behavior from real data generated by web surfing, electronic communications, etc. The thing that grabbed me about this review in BusinessWeek was the line about IBM's effort to "improve productivity and automate management."

I guess we've come a long way from the days when managers got together to decide which of the company's functions were going to be outsourced, and which were going to be automated and people replaced entirely. The notion of automating the management function has a sort of visceral appeal to anyone arbitrarily replaced by a downsizing or outsourcing effort. If you're running a company just by the numbers, and attach little importance to leadership, team building, and other kinds of "soft" skills that many managers put little stock in, maybe you could "automate" management. But I doubt it.

I skimmed the Workers chapter of the book that's excerpted in this review. It's not nearly as dire as the article in BusinessWeek describes. But it's a fact that some managers latch onto tools as a means for solving some of their problems without making a committment to learning the processes and assumptions implicit in the design of the tool. Buy, install, use. And if the results aren't what you expected its a problem with the software.

So we're safe from "automated management" right now. But then I thought personality testing as a means of making hiring decisions would never go anywhere.

IBM speech recognition

IBM has been working on speech recognition for a long time. Still, they've never gained traction with their speech engine in a market dominated by Nuance and its predecessors. This recent article in BusinessWeek about their appearance at SpeechTek 2008 reminded me that they're still there, looking for a market for what may be some pretty good technology.

It's kind of a mystery to me why IBM hasn't made much of an impact on the speech industry. IBM isn't the first company you think of for call center applications, but the engine is available on Avaya's platform. So I don't get it. Any ideas, let me know.