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August 13, 2012

Cloud Solutions to Drive Mobile Speech Recognition Growth

By Rory Lidstone
TMCnet Contributing Writer

Mobile speech recognition technologies continue to improve and evolve, which isn't surprising as major players like Apple (News - Alert) and Google have entered the sector in full force with Siri and Google Now. However, mobile speech recognition may be about to flourish as vendors of speech technology platforms make efforts to enable mobile application developers with speech recognition capabilities.

As ABI Research points out in its latest “Speech Recognition in Mobile Devices” report, companies such as Nuance (News - Alert), AT&T and iSpeech are all exposing their APIs and developer programs as a way to penetrate the market of mobile applications. To achieve this, though, vendors will have to utilize the cloud.

“Reaching a varied group of developers working on different OS and hardware platforms makes cloud based solutions the optimum approach to enabling the masses,” said ABI mobile devices, content and applications senior analyst Michael Morgan, in a statement. “It is the approach of using network based solutions that will drive the rapid increase in cloud based revenues.”

The typical way to deliver mobile speech recognition to consumers is with relationships between device OEMs and platform vendors. The only other route up until now was via virtual assistant applications, which were often developed by the platform vendors themselves. Meanwhile, small app development efforts typically lacked the resources and/or expertise needed to integrate speech recognition into products.

With the cloud as a delivery mechanism, though, platform vendors can enable practically any app developer with speech recognition capability, according to ABI mobile devices, content and applications senior practice director, Jeff Orr.

ABI's complete mobile speech recognition report features further details on the market, as well as analysis of the major players within. IT makes up part of the firm's Mobile Device Enabling Technologies Research Service.

Also part of this service is ABI's "Facial Recognition for Mobile Devices" report, which states that, by the end of 2012, almost 20 percent of annual smartphone shipments will include facial recognition capabilities. Currently, only Android (News - Alert) devices with Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean offer this feature, but the report expects "many more operating systems" to start offering this feature over the next two to three years.

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Edited by Brooke Neuman