Tackling the Bit Pipe Nightmare with a post-ARPU strategy

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The bit pipe nightmare has lurked in the industry’s sub-consciousness for many years now. The threat stemmed from how the Internet would merge with mobile communications, smashing down the traditional operator and subscriber relationships. So far this threat has been contained. Mobile operators adopted a walled garden approach where they aimed to hold on to an exclusive relationship with their customers and gauged their value by the money spent directly with them. And, despite the proliferation of viable mobile broadband, subscribers haven’t strayed very far from the walled garden. That is until now.

In July 2009 the Apple Apps Store will be a year old. Its effect on the operators’ relationships with their customers is profound. Already 500 million iPhone applications have been downloaded from the Apps Store. Other handset vendors like Nokia and RIM are re-modelling themselves as app and media service providers with varying success. As a result, these brands and businesses are developing a myriad of direct relationships with operators’ customers through these new app storefronts.

Given this scenario, which is shared with many households other than mine, it is natural that the mobile operators are now keen to offer similar storefront offerings to their customers. But is this enough? And how can they re-capture the initiative?

Loquendo Lets You Tell Your iPhone Who to Call

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Speech technologies provider, Loquendo, recently announced the release of its very first iPhone (News - Alert) application, Dillo! The new offering is a voice dialer that allows users to say the name of the person or number to call and through speech recognition technology, the iPhone dials the contact based on solely the voice command from the user.

Speech recognition specialist Eckoh leaps ahead on new contract wins

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Eckoh is the UK's largest provider of "hosted speech recognition services" with some very big name clients to its credit.

Today, the company gave us a trading update from which it would seem that the infernal things aren't going away. Quite the contrary in fact, as Eckoh reckons it's benefiting from the economic crisis as the large organisations it serves look to cut costs by using Eckoh's services instead of call centres. The lesser of two evils perhaps?

Last year, Eckoh made an operating loss of £2.75m, but that has been turned around and today we learn that profit that will be in line with market expectations as the company's Speech Solutions division has been doing so well.

Eckoh has also managed to improve margins and reduce admin costs by 25%. And the best thing of all is that the company has a nice big cash pile of over £5m -- representing over a third of the value of the entire company. Also, at the last count, the company had an overall net asset value of £9.6m.

 

Lyrix and Loquendo Partner for Improved Speech Recognition

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In a bid to further improve the functionality of their Mobiso service, Lyrix, a provider of speech-enabled collaboration solutions for large and distributed enterprises, has partnered with speech technologies provider Loquendo.   Lyrix’s speech-enhanced directories are used for Speech Attendants and Speech-assisted Mobile Address Books. The company’s PeopleFind platform also helps businesses with increasingly on the go workers to more efficiently communicate while also reducing costs.

Report: iPhone 3.0 may include voice recognition, synthesis features

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rumors suggest that the iPhone may soon be more receptive to my pleas: Ars Technica reports thatuncovered software frameworks in the iPhone 3.0 beta might represent speech recognition and synthesis systems.

Of course, this isn’t exactly out of left field. Both the latest iPod nano and iPod shuffle include speech synthesis capabilities, dubbed Spoken Menus in the 4G nano and VoiceOver in the iPod shuffle, that allow users to navigate the devices without having to look at the screen. In both cases it helps people who are visually impaired use the devices, but in the shuffle it’s also a necessity, since the device has no screen and a potentially confusing control scheme.

The iPhone and iPod touch are extremely difficult for visually impaired users to interact with, as they have little in the way of tactile cues or feedback. Voice recognition in particular has been a heavily requested feature, as it could improve not just accessibility, but everyday tasks such as dialing a number without having to look at the phone’s screen—handy for when you’re driving, for example.

Cordic Picks Loquendo for Speech Technologies

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Fleet management solutions provider Cordic offers a highly innovative solution for taxi companies that automates taxi bookings. To voice-enable this offering, the company has chosen speech technologies provider Loquendo for their ASR and TTS technologies.   As per the partnership with Loquendo (News - Alert), Cordic’s cPAQ taxi dispatch system now includes IVR capabilities so that customers can book jobs, check on the progress of their bookings, and don’t have to speak to an operator or staff member to get information.

AppTek Bolsters Media Monitoring with Hybrid Machine Translation

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In addition to providing coverage of dialects for automated speech recognition, MediaSphere provides AppTek’s hybrid machine translation system for customers.

MediaSphere is a software solution that offers multilingual transcripts of various television and radio stations for many domestic and international news bureaus. To adjust to changes in dialect and language in real-time, MediaSphere makes use of AppTek’s speaker adaptive speech recognition engine. Offering a unified and scalable solution, the updated media monitoring software seamlessly integrates AppTek’s HMT system with its ASR engine.

East Kent cuts turn around times with SRC

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East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust has been able to reduce cancer diagnosis times by deploying digital dictation with speech recognition from SRC.

The new technology is allowing pathologists to dictate results in real-time. As a result, histology reporting turnaround times have been cut from a week to often the same day.

Paul Williams, head of BMS cellular pathology at East Kent said: “It has been invaluable in helping us to improve reporting turnaround times and eradicate typing backlogs in spite of increasing workloads. Another, unexpected benefit has been freeing up secretarial staff to train in laboratory duties.”