AT&T Speech Mashups Competing with Smart Keypads and Touch-Screen Menus

Implications: AT&T’s speech recognition was designed to speak to a computer from a telephone.  Mobile devices differ because of the efficient and reliable delivery by smart keypads and touch-screen menus.   

Analysis:

AT&T’s Watson Speech Mashups is questionable for being a compelling tool in the mobile lifestyle of texting and clicking to communicate.  The Speech Mashups is an attempt to revitalize the Watson ASAP (Applications Speech Application Program) and Watson ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) that were developed decades ago.  The former Bell Labs had envisioned how the user could talk to a computer like being on the telephone.  The new AT&T Research Labs is trying to apply the speech process technology to network-hosted and Web-based services.

The difference is that mobile users are being attracted to smart keypads and touch-screen menus.  The proliferation of texting has initiated deftness with the keypad to communicate and search.  And a smart keypad might deliver faster conversion speed and greater accuracy.  Nuance has approached mobile applications differently than the speech recognition in its Dragon dictation software and ACD routing such as the licensing with Intervoice.  Nuance is embedding speech recognition with device OEMs, but also exploiting the acquisition of Tegic for predictive text.  Nuance launched its T9Nav search for India that reduces the key presses for features, applications and content.

With the Watson Speech Mashups, AT&T is trying to play its Thomas Watson legacy and appear revolutionary in the virtual space of SOA, SaaS and cloud computing.  The attempt is also to revive AT&T’s subsidiary of YELLOWPAGES.com.  Despite the high visitor count to Yellowpages.com, AT&T will have a challenge accelerating into Web services and competing against Apple’s MobileMe, Google Apps, and Microsoft’s Live Mesh.