Computerworld -
Amazon's recent purchase of Yap, a maker of voice recognition technology, and the arrival of Siri speech software inside Apple's iPhone 4S smartphone have sparked heightened consumer interest in voice commands for smartphones and tablets.
Yet, questions remain about whether or when enterprises will start widely deploying voice recognition technology on mobile devices, partly because internally developed, specialized apps would have to be built to overcome issues like background noise that could corrupt its operation.
"Voice recognition technology has been around for years, but has failed to make a real breakthrough," wrote Declan Lonergan, an analyst at Yankee Group, in a recent blog post. "Nobody has found the secret sauce to create good user experiences centered on voice-based interaction with a personal device."
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Computerworld - Amazon's recent purchase of Yap, a maker of voice recognition technology, and the arrival of Siri speech software inside Apple's iPhone 4S smartphone have sparked heightened consumer interest in voice commands for smartphones and tablets.
Yet, questions remain about whether or when enterprises will start widely deploying voice recognition technology on mobile devices, partly because internally developed, specialized apps would have to be built to overcome issues like background noise that could corrupt its operation.
"Voice recognition technology has been around for years, but has failed to make a real breakthrough," wrote Declan Lonergan, an analyst at Yankee Group, in a recent blog post. "Nobody has found the secret sauce to create good user experiences centered on voice-based interaction with a personal device."
Lonergan and others do credit Apple with pushing the technology forward in the Siri beta speech-enabled personal assistant in the iPhone 4S. "Voice-enablement will be a hotbed of activity in the smartphone space during the next couple of years," Lonergan added.
Analysts said its apparent that Amazon bought Yap to add voice command capabilities to Kindle e-readers and future versions of the Kindle Fire, though they noted that the version of the tablet released this week doesn't even include a microphone.
Amazon didn't respond to a request for an interview to discuss its plans for speech recognition technology.
CLTblog.com first disclosed Amazon's purchase of Yap on Nov. 9. The post cites a Delaware legal filing showing Yap Inc. was acquired by Yarmuth Dion Inc. on Sept. 8, and that the combined entity would be based at the address of Amazon's corporate headquarters in Seattle.
Financial terms of that deal have not been disclosed.
"Amazon could build speech recognition into the Kindle Fire with Yap, but they have a long way to go to catch up to others," said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst and founder of ZK Research. "Voice recognition is extremely important to the evolution of mobile computing. "
By comparison, he said that touchscreens are a "poor input mechanism" for tablets and smartphones.
Kerravala believes as voice recognition improves, its capabilities will allow workers to one day shed laptops in favor of smartphones and tablets.
At the same time, there are skeptics of the technology.
Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates, noted that vendors will be encouraged by Siri and Yap as consumer tech's influence grows in enterprises, but noted that the technology still may not be ready for corporate use.
"It's hard to do industry-specific voice recognition and translation," Gold said. "Many companies, including IBM, Microsoft and Nuance, have tried this for years. Business users expect far higher speech recognition accuracy than consumers. Accessing data in an SAP app is far different than general searching in Google."
Even if Siri becomes a hit among consumers, enterprises might not find it robust or secure enough for corporate use, Gold said. Custom apps would have to be developed to let Siri or Yap access corporate data. Such an in-house project, he said, is "not a trivial task," Gold said.
Gold questioned whether corporate IT would find much return on an investment in technology for using voice commands on mobile devices rather than touchscreens. Interacting with a touchscreen takes no more than two to three clicks to find data, he said, while voice input could face significant problems due to ambient noise or delays in connecting to a server.
"What happens if a clerk is working in a noisy store environment around Christmas time when carols are blaring and kids are screaming?" Gold said. "There are many factors" that could disrupt its operation.
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