Nuance Shutters SpinVox Consumer Service

It's been just over 3 months since Nuance acquired SpinVox, saving the company from a death spiral. Since the acquisition a string of news stories have surfaced about the financial shenanigans that went on at SpinVox prior to Nuance's purchase. It's a shame that Spinvox fell to such lows. They had a great idea and were developing credible technological solutions.

A recent and not too surprising post on SpinVox's website indicates that they will discontinue their consumer offerings allowing them to focus on their carrier and network operator business.

A Twitter post from SpinVox stated: "We regret to inform you that SpinVox is no longer supporting individual user accounts. Your account will expire in 7 days. "

No word yet on what they intend to do with consumer customers of Jott, the Seattle based competitor of SpinVox that Nuance also purchased.

Speaker Authentication using Voice Biometrics - Now's the time!

I'm working on a project for one of my clients who's interested in using voice biometrics to authenticate callers. Voice biometrics uses the unique ways that individuals formulate phonemes to create a voice signature that can be used to validate a person's identity at a later time. It seems that the actual use cases today are fairly narrow, mostly password reset applications such as those from Nuance Communications or access to corporate based auto-attendants.

Based on the research I've been doing for my client, several recent environmental and economic changes make this a compelling time to investigate integrating voice biometric based authentication into your transactional environment.

Three factors make this so:

• The advent of so many hosted SaaS (software as a service) offerings from experienced voice services firms like Voxeo, TradeHarbor, BeVocal, Convergys, Authentify, Angel.com, CSIdentity, PhoneFactor and others.
  
  
• Ubiquity of telephones (both land line and cellular) as a transaction end point for authentication across all channels. Even internet based transactions can use outbound phone calls to reach a user to authenticate them.
  
  
• The ability to combine speech recognition and voice authentication to achieve true multi-factor authentication and the corresponding higher confidence in the security provided by using speech recognition to gather content (something the user knows) and voice authentication (some the user is).

The move to SaaS offerings is a real game changer, significantly lowering the barrier of entry by lowering the cost and the integration complexity with existing applications - regardless of the channel. Since it's voice and there is a phone available almost everywhere to use as the authentication end-point there is no need to invest in expensive dedicated hardware like fingerprint scanners and cameras for facial recognition.

When faced with the need for more secure access to transactions across a variety of channels (phone, web, smart phones, etc.) voice based authentication can provide high confidence, secure, multi-factor authentication with a lower capital expenditure, less complexity and quicker time to implementation that any other biometric solution that I've examined.

Despite being a skeptic . . I'm impressed

You would think that since I've made a career of working with speech recognition technology that I would be wildly enthusiastic about it and just like a carpenter with a hammer would see every problem as a nail. Not so with me!

I got into this technology reluctantly and have remained largely skeptical ever since. It's just in the past few years I have become truly comfortable in recommending voice recognition technology as a viable and solid technology to be used in business solutions. Even then, I'm careful and conservative in when and how I make that recommendation. I have to be 100 percent confident that the proposed solution can succeed and will prove successful both in the mind of the user and the business.

Along the way I've tried, sampled and tested almost everything offering including the desktop recognition packages from IBM's ViaVoice, Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking and most recently the speech recognition included in Microsoft's Windows Vista. After every one of these trials, I've uninstalled or disabled the recognition package and gone back to my keyboard. While they worked to a greater or lesser degree they never "excited me" and often were more trouble than they were worth.

Despite previous mediocrity, I keep trying new versions or products. This week I finally got around to installing Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking 10, after it lay on my desk for month's.

The installation process was quick and easy with no complications and once installed the product walked me through a basic set process to set and calibrate the audio input source (I have multiple devices with microphones attached to my Dell Vostro with Windows Vista) and complete a short training exercise by reading a Dave Barry column so that Naturally Speaking could create a user profile for me. All done in less than one half hour from start to finish, including time to download and install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable.

For those of you who know me in person, you'll no doubt remember that I have a distinct southern accent, having grown up near Memphis, TN. One of the user configuration options was a choice of languages that included General US or Southern US. I resisted temptation and chose General just to test Naturally Speaking a bit more.

Now after a few days of use, I have to admit amazement! The recognition is incredibly accurate and quick. I've not typed an instant message or email so far this week. All have been dictated using Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking 10. In fact this entire blog entry was done using speech dictation.

I've only experienced two problems:

1) Some issues with product names or proper names like Vostro, which require correct.

2) I think I need a more highly directional microphone for my headset. I listen to my local public radio station in the background while at my desk and if I'm quite without telling the software to stop listening it will start transcribing the conversation on KUOW 94.9 that's playing in the background. This might make it difficult to use Dragon in a loud office or call enter environment.

That's my two cents worth . . . and if you're interested, I have a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.0 that I never got around to installing. It's for sale on eBay!

California Bans Texting and Driving

We all know in our "gut" that texting on our cell phones while driving or conducting any other task that requires high concentration and motor skills is seriously distracting. A good example of this is the recent fatal train accident in southern California. The NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) has determined that the engineer of the train that caused the accident was sending text messages from his cell phone during the last few minutes before the accident and the belief is that this may have contributed to the accident.

Last fall at Nuance Communication's CONVERSATIONS Conference, one of the keynote sessions involved a demonstration of just how dangerous and distracting "texting" was. You can see a video of this demonstration on YouTube at Amazing Race: Distracted Driving.

This past week California's Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger said "Hasta la vista" to texting while driving and terminated a loophole in California's vehicle code that banned drivers from talking on cell phones while driving without a hands-free device but let them communicate via text messages. The Associated Press reported that the governor signed the law which will take effect on January 1, 2009. My home state of Washington had already banned text messaging while driving.

Given the usefulness of these devices it's difficult to image that we'll break our addiction to the BlackBerry or iPhone -- they don't call it a "CrackBerry" without a reason. That said, speech recognition technology offers a straight forward way to improve safety in the way we use these devices without taking away their convenience. Several services and embedded applications have already reached the market which address this problem. One example that I've blogged about before is Jott Networks. Jott allows you to dial their service and then send notes to yourself and others entirely using voice recognition based navigation and dictation. Others companies with similar offerings include SpinVox and SimulSays. When combined with voice based dialing and hands free access, these services remove most of the physical contact required to interact with mobile devices, eliminating much of the distraction that occurs when you interact via the keyboard.

This lesson can be carried over to the customer service world. Many IVR based self service applications in use today require serious use of the DTMF keypad for entry of things like account numbers, choices from lists, ticker symbols, etc. and pose the same risk to drivers as other kinds of text messaging. Given the prevalence in the use of cell phones these days, I think a strong case can be made for speech enabling applications which have complex DTMF (touch tone) entry requirements simply as a safety step for callers and to avoid potential legal issues which may become a problem as more and more states impose similar bans on non-hands-free use of cell phones.