Xbox 360 to use Fonix Voice Technology

Fonix Speech, a division of Fonix Corp. will continue to deliver voice command technology to Microsoft's Xbox 360. The company previously provided voice recognition development tools for the Xbox to let developers integrate voice commands into games.

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Microsoft Launches Microsoft Speech Server 2004 R2

Bummer, still no support for industry standard VoiceXML. When are those guys in Redmond going to wake up? ;-)

Read the press release.

VoiceXML Platform Certification Watch!

Looks like two more vendors got added to the VoiceXML Forum's list of certified VoiceXML platforms: Avaya and Genesys. I haven't seen press releases from either, though. I guess achieving platform certification these days is not so newsworthy anymore - its a given.

Another Acquisition for ScanSoft

Speech and imaging technology firm ScanSoft has acquired Illinois-based MedRemote, a developer of medical informatics and transcription workflow services, for $6.2m.

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World's First and Only Voice Recognition Hearing Aid

"A person speaks in a normal tone of voice, the system translates the spoken words to written text, displays the text, and the impaired person reads what has been said. They then respond and a conversation is carried out in a near normal fashion."

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"We like being private", Mike McCue - Tellme CEO

We posted recently on Tellme IPO rumors. Here is an interesting read on the same topic published last week by Red Herring. IPO or not, this "$100-million-plus juggernaut of a voice platform and networking company" will be around for a while!

spkydog prediction rings true: Scansoft Acquires Nuance!

Late last year spkydog mused about the possibilities of Scansoft soon gobbling up Nuance. The inevitable has happened. This evening, Scansoft announced it had agreed to acquire its rival Nuance for $221 million. The combined company will operate under the Nuance name, and should enjoy a lion's share of the speech server market. What could possibly be next? spkydog previously posted about Microsoft's veiled support of VoiceXML... perhaps the next step will be their acquisition of IBM's speech technology? ;-)

Read the article.

Speech Reco in AT&T Exec's Top 10 Predictions

Hossein Eslambolchi, CTO and CIO of AT&T, delivered a visionary keynote at Interop in Las Vegas in the form of a Top 10 List. Speech recognition (as a security biometric) and e-collaboration share the sixth entry in the list:

"No. 6: e-Collaboration will dominate the workplace -- promoting foster next-generation speech recognition.

The pervasiveness of broadband will foster greater collaboration of all kinds, across business and entertainment industries, said Eslambolchi. Additionally, the rapid development pace of voice recognition will make voice identification the biometric security method of choice, he said. "Pin numbers and pass codes in the next 10 years will disappear," he said. "

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New issue of the VoiceXML Review ezine published

Don't forget to checkout the March/April issue of the VoiceXML Forum's "VoiceXML Review" ezine that was just published.

Read the VoiceXML Review.

Leading VoiceXML Vendors Tellme and BeVocal Go Public in 2005?

The San Jose Business Journal quotes Ms. Marci Gottlieb on the IPO subject:

"We have no plans to go public now. That's the party line, But if the market conditions are right and Tellme has a use for the money, it may go public."

According to the bizjournal article, Steve Tran, one of BeVocal's founders responded to the IPO question with essentially the same answer. Another interesting data point from Mr. Tran is his claim that BeVocal clients prevent 50%-80% of their calls going to live operators. That's a bit higher than the 15%-30% numbers the article quotes for traditional IVR premise solutions.

Evidently BeVocal's recent $10M round of additional venture capital has been provoking the IPO rumors.

Read the San Jose Business Journal article.