Coty's Weblog

Nokia going retail

I was surprised a few weeks back when I noticed unlocked Nokia phones at CompUSA. Today I notice that Gizmodo is reporting Nokia to Open Retail Stores.

Quoting Gizmodo:

Taking a page from the Gateway and Apple playbooks, Nokia will open two U.S. stores in Chicago and New York where they will sell all the hotness that the carriers don't know how to market.

“[H]otness that the carriers don't know how to market”, indeed. I'm so tired of waiting for T-Mobile to carry decent handsets. I’m so hoping I’ll be able to pick up an E61 relatively soon and not have to wait on T-Mobile.

Of course, the coolness of having gotten an unlocked handset via channels will be gone, but such is progress.

Voice services on Skype via Angel.com

So just yesterday I was just complaining yesterday about the weakness of the Skype “API” and what I see as the associated lack of innovative voice services on the Skype network. Then last night I ran across this post on the Angel.com IVR Blog: Skype and Angel.com — What to Expect.

Kudos to Angel.com for bringing “speech-enabled automation services” to the Skype network, but I wonder whether Angel.com worked around the Skype limitations I described or whether they have some special access.

What Skype should really do

Peeter Mõtsküla posted the provocatively titled Naked Skype? to the Skype Developer Zone Blog recently. Alec Saunders commented on that in the less pruriently but more descriptively titled post, Separate the Skype Engine From the GUI.

This is something that we've talked about at Vocalocity a number of times and that I've been surprised has gotten so little discussion elsewhere—at least that I've seen. To me it has seemed a bit much to talk about a Skype API, when that API doesn't really give you access to the core of Skype's feature set: Voice over IP. All the Skype API really does is let you control the Skype application—and even then you can't get access to the audio stream without doing something hokey. Weak.

It is nice that everyone is getting free phone calls over the Internet and cheap calls over the PSTN, but having the Skype protocol locked up within the Skype application—with or without a GUI—is, overall, bad for innovation in the space. Skype needs to open the protocol.

Think about how many more interesting voice applications could be deployed on the Skype network if it were possible to do so without having to route through either an instance of the Skype app or the PSTN. How disappointing that you cannot.

What do I know, though? I didn't sell my company to eBay for $2.6 billion.

More interesting than Google Calendar...

is the news of Google's voice search patent filing—at least for me. Granted, I work at a company in a related space, but this is something that would interest me regardless. I use Google all the time. I even use it in my car, but that isn't very safe. I would love to be able to search and hear results on my Bluetooth headset.

Google, if you're listening, please make it an option to receive results via SMS. Full-on multimodal interaction would really be the way to go, but we're not quite there, yet. Enabling some way to push a result to Google Local for Mobile would be great, too.

Oh, also, when you get around to enabling voice conferencing via Google Talk, it would be great if you could offer the option to record and do ASR on the call. Maybe pump the recognized text into a Writely document for collaborative editing. Put the contents into my Google Desktop index. Etc.

Microsoft and Vocalocity in the news

spkydog beat me to it, but I thought I'd also point to Microsoft's announcement today that Speech Server 2007 will support VoiceXML.

This is exciting news for the VoiceXML community. It is particularly exciting for Vocalocity, as we licensed some of our technology and worked with Microsoft to develop their standards-compliant implementation of VoiceXML for Speech Server 2007.

More information and comments from both Microsoft and our CEO, Mike Dickerson, on the agreement can be found in our press release:

Vocalocity Announces Strategic Licensing Agreement with Microsoft

Cool, a manifesto

All the DEMO news about iotum (They walked away with a DEMOgod award, in case you missed it.) took me to their web site where I ran across this:

Voice 2.0: A Manifesto for the Future

First off, I have to say I'm glad to be working in an industry with a manifesto. I think it is a pretty good manifesto, too. Alec is dead on with regard to the end of metering and the emergence of applications as the value creators for voice. I think we at Vocalocity have a lot to offer those wanting to create value in this Voice 2.0 world, and there is more coming.

Alec is dead on, too, about how the impending change is going to be painful for some. I can see one company for which it could be painful out my office window. I hope I turn out to be wrong, but that won't be up to me.