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.

Spinvox: speech-to-human-to-text

If you're a speech-to-text company trying to position yourself in the market as a technology leader, you don't like to see these kinds of news articles about your company. Employees of the company say that they were transcribing voice messages left by users. Spinvox's speech-to-text software is supposed to do it automatically. Thanks to Peter Nann for the pointer to this article.

Speech to text: Jott

A few weeks ago I blogged about the Spinvox demo that transcribes a short message and texts it to your cell phone. Then someone pointed me to Jott, which transcribes your message and sends it in email to someone in your phone book. I'm impressed. Voice transcription has come a long way since I started playing with IBMs Via Voice years ago. The old transcription systems were speaker dependent, and required a high quality microphone and a lot of training for the performance to be very good. Spinvox and Jott are doing speaker independent transcription, and from callers on cell phones as well. There are a lot of potential applications out there, just waiting for someone to develop them.

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.