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In the last decade, the speech technology market has evolved radically, owing to mergers and acquisitions that have led to a consolidation of the sector and resulted in just a few dominant players.

Loquendo, created in 2001 from the technological core of Telecom Italia, put out a white paper explaining the basics of speech technology. Here is a basic overview of a few of the major points the paper covers:

Interacting with machines that listen, understand and react to human stimuli has been for many years the holy grail of scientists across disciplines.

Florida-based Results Group, an outsourced contact center services provider in business for over 20 years, operates client dedicated centers in the United States, Canada, Europe and the Caribbean with a staff of over 4,000 agents.

But following a rapid growth in business, they expanded their operation by opening 23 new contact centers across North America and Europe. Even for an organization used to large numbers, that was a lot.

So to meet the new demand for client contacts, they needed a scalable call recording and quality monitoring product.

The world unified communications markets are poised for a huge leap forward as "technologies mature and businesses acknowledge the value of integrating disparate communications and collaboration technologies," according to a recent study.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, "World Unified Communications Markets," finds that the installed base of fully-integrated UC users in 2009 was about 2 million, and is likely to reach 50 million by 2015.

As a nascent and largely untested technology, "UC suffered severely from the global recession, which forced businesses to limit investments to those generating immediate ROI," the study found.

Frost & Sullivan Principal Analyst, Unified Communications and Collaboration, Melanie Turek, said UC "offers the potential to drive growth in related markets and encourages companies to upgrade their equipment sooner than they might otherwise."

A laptop computer battery maker and a couple dozen other battery manufacturers in Taiwan will start developing products using a new safety material intended to keep lithium-ion cells from overheating when damaged.

IDG News Service is reporting that The Industrial Technology Research Institute "has developed the polymer STOBA (self-terminated oligomers with hyper-branched architecture) after a high-profile laptop battery recall in 2006 in which 9.6 million Sony batteries were recalled due to an overheating hazard that had caused some laptops to catch fire."

STOBA keeps damaged batteries from overheating, "thereby avoiding meltdowns or fires," IDG says.

Here's industry observer Matt Peckham's strategy: "Figure out how to live at or under 32GB with a pair of cheap 16GB memory sticks.

Recently TMC's Alice Straight had a chance to interview Greg Plum, director of business development for The Conference Group. Among other topics, Plum discussed Conference Group's upcoming showing at InfoComm.

"What will the Conference Group be showcasing at InfoComm 2010?" Straight asked Plum. "This is the Conference Group's first time exhibiting at InfoComm. We are excited to showcase all of our conferencing platforms, including audio, web and video," he answered.

Plum went on to say that all of The Conference Group's (News - Alert) services are available as software as a service offerings, "enabling our clients to access our services with no capital expense and with fast and efficient implementation."