Yahoo Guts Nuance R&D

Google is not the only one getting accused of poaching speech technologists from competitors. Most recently, Nuance has filed a lawsuit accusing Yahoo of stealing trade secrets. Evidently Yahoo has recently hired 13 former Nuance speech technologists. You can read the gory details in this recent article. Given, Scansoft's recent acquisition of Nuance, I suppose the 13 should of waited for their voluntary severance packages, and then joined Yahoo. ;-)

Will Skype Manage to Create the Elusive "Voice Web"?

While VoiceXML has done MUCH to establish an competitive, innovative and level playing field for the traditionally proprietary IVR industry, it has yet to result in the "voice web" its original creators had anticipated. That is a web of voice content available to POTS phones that mirrors the web you surf on your desktop.

Today, Skype has announced their Voice Services Program, that in many ways seems to be all about creating this elusive voice web, for the Skype user community. Whether or not they will succeed at this remains to be seen, but they've certainly picked the right technology (VoiceXML) and right technology partners (Tellme, Voxeo, and VoxPilot platforms are the best available!).

What do you all think?

IBM Open Source Initiatives for Speech Technologies

Here's a quick up-to-date summary of IBM's speech-related open source initiatives speech technology folks will want to be aware of. From the Reusable Dialog Components (RDC) contributed to Apache, to Eclipse-based tooling, IBM has been fairly active in this area in recent months.

http://advisor.com/doc/17032

Voice-enabled RSS Feeds

Matt Headd posted this interesting article on using VoiceXML to read RSS feeds. Matt has a demo running on Voxeo's platform that allows you to browser recent postings on CNET news.com. (Dial 800-289-5570 and use pin 9991422919) . Matt's also got an informative VoiceXML/speech technology blog you'll want to check out: www.voiceingov.org.