I was in Barcelona last month at the Mobile World Congress. Here are some of my speech-centric observations:
I went by the Microsoft booth on the first day of the show and asked when WinMobile7 would be announced. The guy on the floor acted like he had no clue what I was talking about. He wouldn’t even confirm it hadn’t been announced yet. The really ironic thing is that EVERYWHERE I went I saw Windows 7 advertisements…subways, stairs, hotel lobbies, etc. My friend Dan had a couple of corporate suites at the hotel across from the show, and asked about putting up a flier to say what floor they were on. He found out the entire hotel advertising space was taken by Microsoft! They had gotten an exclusive from the hotel.
Speaking of Dan…we’re old friends from school and decided to meet up for dinner. He said “Are you OK with a Tapas Bar?” and I said “Actually, I’m kinda hungry, if you really want to go, let’s do it after we eat.” I had made a speech recognition error…think about it.
Anyways…WinMobile 7 was announced on Day 2, and I saw some of the demos. I must say that Microsoft is taking a brave approach by completely redesigning the interface to be more focused on data (people, places) than on functions (applications, etc.) However, even with the new look and feel I didn’t hear any mention of any new speech recognition features, like um, a voice interface. I asked a guy on the floor, and he said the voice search was much improved. I like BING search, Google search and Vlingo search too as they are all getting more useful and robust. A couple of years ago, I was trying one of these search engines to find my hotel in downtown Boston, and after 3 or 4 failed attempts on a street corner, a woman pointed down the street and said “Your hotel is just down there”. A memory flashback…a cabbie on that trip asked me what I did and I said “speech recognition.” He said “oh I’ve been trying that for years…my wife talks to me and sometimes I respond properly.” But I digress…
Back to Barcelona. I saw a nice demo of MOTONAV at the Motorola booth. With a new independent consumer-product company spun out and Sanjay Jha in charge, they really seem to have turned things around. The people on the show floor seemed very upbeat and excited about where Motorola is right now. In addition to the 23 phones they currently offer, they have new ones coming out, including the new Devour and Cliq XT, both of which are based on the Android OS. I didn’t see much new stuff in the Bluetooth space, however. They are doing PNDs (portable navigation devices) and cell phones with MOTONAV. It’s a nice voice-controlled driving application, and the speech recognition in the demo I saw worked quite well on the hard stuff (addresses, etc.), but messed up on the easy things (it was a simple 2 word set that it got wrong.) Then again, small sets aren’t always easier than big ones. The Yes/No response is one of the hardest sets to get right (I heard that there are more than 50 ways to say No and almost as many ways to say Yes…like unh-unh and unh-huh…(I can’t even get that right spelling it!).
The big thing missing from MOTONAV is a Truly Hands-Free Trigger. In fact, that’s what is missing from the entire cell phone industry. All these products have built-in speech recognition, but the only way to activate it is with button presses. I found an article about “The First Truly Hands-Free Phone.” HOWEVER, when you read through it you find it really requires 2 button presses…one to turn it on and a second to activate the voice recognition. Well, Sensory can get rid of one of those button presses, which is a HUGE savings for products that can be turned on and are always listening. As battery technology improves and more “smart” listening windows are deployed, Truly Hands-Free triggers will become increasingly important for all products with speech technologies.