Voice. An Opinion.

This report will necessarily be a little patchy, as we were kept going all the time between stand duties and meetings. However, we did get a little time to look around and pick up some buzz from the show. In no particular order, some tidbits from last week in Las Vegas.

I thought the Yahoo announcement was significant. It’s a smart use of voice (well, we would say that :-). You download a client for RIM’s Blackberry devices and then you can “speak your query”. The client does a speech-to-text conversion on the fly, and also uses “Search Assist” - which does predictive completion, and search-ahead to generate potential common matches for most-used terms matching what you’ve said. The technology powering this is from Vlingo - who also announced a $20M funding round from Yahoo. I think the way this stuff works is similar to Yap - the voice data is captured on the fly, sent over the data channel to Vlingo’s remote servers where the audio is processed and the text returned. Neat. The Yahoo service itself comes across as well thought-through in terms of its integration with other Yahoo services, rather than something just “rushed out the door”. Signs of life in the old dog yet for Yahoo despite it’s various travails.

As the handset players all gear up to respond to the iPhone gauntlet, it seems to me that it’s the Koreans who are really on the ball here. First LG with the LG Voyager, then LG Vu, and now Samsung with the Instinct, which picked up a best-of-show Award from CNet. Anecdotally, among the various developer and technical sessions I attended, I notice that the Nokia N95 is the uber-tech of choice for anyone who has eschewed an iPhone. Of course, even that’s now passé as the N96 has been announced (CNet review here). Oh dear, our CEO is going to have to get another new phone

One of the things we’ve mentioned before is that Android may unleash an era of hyper-customisation on the phone. A recap: Android let’s you customise everything: the dialler, the messaging interfaces, the whole lot. The implications of this are only beginning to be digested, in my opinion. For example, I think many brands might like the potential to create phones where every aspect of the phone experience is branded and altered to serve the brand. What’s to stop Kanye West offering his own phone, where the dialler ejects small Kanye samples as you call and hangup, where Kany’es number is in the contacts (not his real number, silly! His SayNow number!!), where Jaiku will provide automatic updates to Kanye’s “status”, and where Kanye’s various media elements - images, sounds, songs, video can be seamlessly stiched in to the overall phone experience and even shared with others. At CTIA, even AT&T seemed to agree this was a good thing.

Aside from Yahoo’s announcement, the other app we liked was DashWire, which announced some updates to the service. Worth a look - it’s a “do stuff on your phone, but from your computer” service, and is nicely done

And finally, my favourite quote from the show comes from this excellent article in TelephonyOnline, describing the traditional players as operating a “cartel of mediocrity” (unnamed source alert) and bemoaning the fact that it’s the Internet players seem to be grabbing the sex and sizzle in mobile services these days! Ouch! This was a theme also common at eComm a few weeks back - a power shift is underway in the Telecom Industry, and all involved should strap themselves in for some entertaining changes!