Punch and Judy at MWC: Nuance doesn’t work – Oh! Yes it does says Rogers Wireless and Mike Wehrs
Using speech to make data services easy is expected to be the killer application of the future. But personal experience with voice to data services have left confusion as to whether or not voice search and services can actually deliver.
As a Judge for the Best Mobile Services category at the Mobile World Congress, I spent a long time assessing each and every application. Nuance was one of the companies that had applied for an award (have received permission from Nuance to mention this).
So having written a lot of articles on Nuance and having been a follower from day one (without success), I decided to do some more digging. At the bottom of the well written proposal was an operator quote. It was from Rogers Wireless.
So, I picked up the phone and game the operator a call. I didn’t catch him so I emailed him. Within a few days, I got a lovely email.
He said that Nuance was in the network. So it was deployed by the operator to all customers that guaranteed a superior quality. He apologised that I had trouble with Nuance, but said that the service in the networks was returning high quality results for use. He went on to say that he had no complaints.
This was very interesting as I thought that voice controlled data services had been plagued by poor uptake. But according to Rogers this has not been the case.
Does this mean that Nuance does have the ability to dominate voice applications via voice, voice and text (Tegic purchase) or multi-modal?
At Mobile World Congress I interviewed Mike Wehrs – he has a lot of titles but I prefer Chief Evangelist for Nuance.
I started off by saying in a scenario with Nuance vs Nuance it might be your own company that is shooting itself in the foot. He looked at me confused.
I elaborated. I said, on the one had the ease of use for Dragon is excellent. But on the other hand, (I showed him a demo of VoiceSignal services on my Nokia N73). He agreed that there were issues concerning deployment of an application on an individual mobile device, but shouted that Nuance did have a help line. I contested that it only takes one poor experience to kill a service in the mobile industry.
He said, he was aware of this and Nuance had taken some radical steps over the past year to make the company more agile and stronger. I asked what?
Mike Wehrs elaborated,
• Nuance is now organised into divisions. Instead of a “one group” policy there are sub segments focusing on multi-modal, BeVocal, VoiceSignal, Tegic etc.
• The push to have consumers download Nuance services has been replaced with a network approach
Then I asked, was purchasing BeVocal a mistake? “Absolutely, not” he responded. (But he is the Chief Evangelist and I still think that it was as the technology wasn’t as good as VoiceSignal’s and weeks after buying BeVocal: VoiceSignal – the biggest competitor – was bought too).
But that is another story. I am looking at Nuance with eyes wide open and am planning a series of interviews with all the players to really understand what multi-modal will mean and how it can add value to mobile services.
Mobile Voice search and services are vital parts of the value chain moving forward. Many companies are in the space but only a few is capable of dominating the space and Nuance is one of them.
Rating: you talkin’ to me? ARE YOU TALKING TO ME?
NO MATCH FOUND.
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