Yesterday evening I was at the ‘Enabling Mobile Voice Services’  MoMo London event sponsored by Skype. AudioBoo, HulloMail and Communigate gave demos/presentations followed by a panel/audience discussion involving people from Hutchison 3g (H3G), Nuance, Google, AudioBoo and Nicky Hickman who works freelance in project and innovation management.

Here are some of my notes from the evening…

• Audioboo has managed to get 38,000 users in 10 months.
• Is the async side of voice a missed opportunity?
• A challenge for small developers working with voice is that IP is tied up with large companies.
• Another problem is the large volumes of data that need to be handled.
• Skype has an open source codec.
• Voice is becoming a new input method for applications (can choose to speak rather than type on Android keyboard).
• Similarly, voice will become a new application output method.
• Nuance app (their iPhone app) sends data to the server for recognition. Unable to do recognition on the phone as it is not powerful enough and vocabulary/accents variants would take up too much space. (Their iPhone app has had over 3 million downloads)
• Nuance are open to sharing voice technologies via SDK.
• On H3G, network capacity consumed by voice is much less than that used by data (due to dongles I suspect).
• H3G are already seeing voice being substituted by sms, email, IM, especially in younger age groups, as it’s seen as cheaper.
• Why hasn’t visual voicemail (controlling voicemail via app) become ubiquitous? Hard to get compatibility across all handsets. No standard API that works with all carrier messaging systems.
• Why does H3G use normal phone call for Skype rather than VOIP (more details in my previous post)? To guarantee good call quality.
• Voice recognition (Nuanace) works well in ideal situations but not so good in noisy or (network) bandwidth limited situations.
• There may be a social barrier to using voice to control things in public places. It may need social acceptance.
• It has been shown that people can’t do complex tasks using audio. We aren’t wired that way.

Finally, a tip from me. There’s a great site on VOIP if you are thinking of developing some sort of mobile voice solution.

Related Articles:

• Voice 2.0
• 3 SkypePhone

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 8:55 am and is filed under Mobile, MoMoLondon, MoMo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.