Industry Insight - HD Voice Archives

Talking About SpeechTEK

2012-08-14T14:31:50Z

Yesterday, I attended SpeechTek in New York. With all the hype and bling in our industry revolving around video and data, SpeechTek makes no bones about expanding beyond voice to include “multimodal” self service. However, Siri has revitalized speech itself, and I found the show fairly vitalized because of this. This show is definitely different than it used to be.

The SpeechTek website explains this change best: “Smartphone and tablet applications provide convenient and intuitive interactions by allowing customers to use different input methods (talk, touch, and type) and see and listen to results. Multimodal applications have raised customer expectations for service across all modalities, and organizations need to understand and deploy self-service technologies wisely to meet the needs of today’s connected customers. That’s why SpeechTEK 2012 is expanding its focus beyond IVR to include smartphone and tablet applications.” The show did execute on this promise, at least what I saw.

While I spoke on a panel about HD Voice, I also took the time to attend some sessions. One session in particular about Advanced Spoken Language Research, done by someone from ICSI (International Computer Science Institute), was interesting.

2012 is the 60^th Birthday of Speech Recognition. Speech Recognition has come a long way since its early beginnings, due to technology improvements (processing power) and research.

Current “hot” topics in Speech are as follows. I list them here since you as a reader may think of some cool, money-making application:

Speech Retrieval – searching the web for spoken words (i.e. looking for words in a YouTube video)
Speech Synthesis – computer talking back to you intelligently
Speaker identification – for passwords, etc.
Non-linguistic information – for instance, detecting lying (better than humans)
Speaker diarization – who is speaking when, in a continuous stream of speakers

So all you innovators, let’s get going!

Everything Everywhere Except...3G and HD Voice and...

2010-09-08T14:05:06Z

As some of you may know, Everything Everywhere is a merger of the UK Orange and UK T-Mobile. The EU took a hard look at it since it would be the UK's largest mobile operator and approved the deal in March.

Everything Everywhere just announced the first tangible benefit of the deal is free roaming between networks. This makes sense as it's the easiest thing to do. A September 6^th press release actually claims though this is the "single, biggest improvement of network coverage since the birth of mobile". As a marketing guy, I love how bombastic this is, but really?

To me, the network coverage is exactly the same. There are no extra towers being built. It's just a first step in a single network. But this is only for 2G services. Why? I don't know. Is it because most people are on 3G now and that won't be free if you happen to roam between networks? I hope there is a technical reason as opposed to that since only a 2G benefit is specious.

Given Orange UK just announced HD Voice coverage in the UK, HD Voice calls also can't be switched between networks at this time since T-Mobile UK would need to have that implemented, including having HD capable phones. So it's not quite everything everywhere yet, except as a vision. A good vision at that, but the everything and everywhere part still has some ground to plow.

A Mobile HD Voice Update

2010-09-01T13:43:42Z

As readers of this blog know, I periodically write about HD Voice. And I've written about Orange being a leader with mobile HD Voice. On their website, they claim that "by the end of the summer 2010, their 3G network will be 100% HD voice." (Note: you can click the Google translate bar if you don't read French!). And today, they have announced that they are the first operator to launch mobile HD Voice in the UK. This is indeed good news and it's good to see that Orange is sticking to their commitments regarding HD Voice on their network.

While we know mobile HD Voice is a known quantity in Europe, and is known in the US (though more on the enterprise side), it's also good to see that HD Voice is getting a voice in Asia. Here is an excellent article written by John Tanner in Telecom Asia. Remember that there are 5 pages in this article, so you need to click to go to pages 2, 3, 4 and 5.

If you want to hear more about HD Voice, you can come to my panel in the Mobile Communication track at IT Expo in Los Angeles in early October.

HD Voice: What's Not to Like?

2010-06-25T15:55:03Z

A few days ago I wrote about the growth path of HD voice and how some people think it's growing faster than expected, and some people think it's growing slower than expected. There is definitely a lot of hype about HD Voice, which leads me to believe it is growing pretty fast.

Orange UK recently announced that they will be trialing HD voice across several major UK cities. Their initial trails, which were done in Moldova, had positive feedback. People claimed that the new HD service was clearer, eliminating background noise and making voices more distinct and more natural sounding - like being in the same room as the person you're on the phone with! I can only imagine how HD voice will improve business processes. It will be great for long conference calls, and for calls that have several participants with different accents. I'm sure we've all been on calls where we have to struggle to understand what's being said...hopefully HD voice will solve these kinds of problems, making communication smoother and increasing productivity!

At any rate, it will be interesting to see what the results are of the HD voice trials in the UK. If they're positive, Orange plans to go ahead with a UK-wide deployment before the end of the summer. I have a feeling people will be really happy with HD voice and the growth path will continue upward. Once I get my HD capable phone at work, I'll let you know how it works for me.

The HD Voice Growth Path

2010-06-16T16:07:42Z

HD Voice is on a growth path. Some say slower than expected, some say faster than expected. Like many things, that is dependent on your point of view. One way to measure growth is the amount written about a topic. There is an HD Voice News site that I visit from time to time. And a quick search yields quite a few articles - here is a recent one talking about mobile VoIP and here is one in Polish - I don't know what it says (though it seems to be talking about telepresence) but it clearly says "HD Voice" in there, as well as "HD Video".

Another way to measure growth is my use of a new technology. I'm about to get an HD capable phone at work, so I'll be HD enabled soon. Basically I'll be voice enabling my email address. There is a whitepaper at siptosip.net that explains how this works. I won't be able to get to the PSTN, but I'm looking forward to making some HD Voice calls and I'll let you know how it goes.