After fifteen years in speech, language and Internet technology, I’m about to make a big career shift. Three weeks from now,  on February 22, I will join the ranks of the TeleAtlas/TomTom engineering force in the beautiful city of Ghent, on a permanent, full-time basis. My task: contribute to various process automation and improvement initiatives.

The reasons for this change are manifold, as they always are.

Firstly, I was craving to work (again) in an environment that blends innovation culture with a clear international dimension. Over the last five and a half years, I have had the chance to work on a number of international opportunities, ranging from the Beavis and Butthead Hotline to a project for a speaker verification company in Ireland. But in between, and all too often, I had the feeling to be missing out on much of the professional fun. This situation could not last forever.

Secondly, every now and then it’s good to enter a domain (geographical data management and applications) that is both new enough to be intellectually stimulating, and familiar enough to be digestible in a reasonably short time-frame. I’m very much looking forward to applying software development automation, process improvement and/or machine learning techniques in this new setting.

Thirdly, it will be great to have real colleagues again. However hospitable a customer’s working environment may be,  a freelancer fundamentally stays an outsider; however amicable relations with partner companies may be, there generally is no Big Plan or Strategy guiding your actions in a direction that goes further than your next assignment.

It’s not that we haven’t tried, as an industry. Since 2005, the Speech Technology Workgroup of ContactCentres.be have put a lot of effort into getting the speech technology business (back) on track in the Belgian telco and call center world. Our seminars in Diegem and Brussels have featured a number of local success stories. But the fact remains that the adoption of speech technology in this country has been slower than in the Anglo-Saxon world, Germany or France. A bizarre blend of overconfidence and lack of ambition from the major local players is one reason. Another one is the refusal of government agencies and state-run companies to programmatically open up public data for the innovative developer community (contrast this with data.gov and data.gov.uk).

Don’t get me wrong:  our industry pipeline does have a few high-profile speech projects coming up. But they won’t be for me anymore. It’s time to (let) go.

My life as a freelancer has brought me to some interesting (read: sunny) places like Silicon Valley, Mallorca and Cannes. It has also put me in contact with a number of smart and driven people who have made a difference to me. Special thanks, in no particular order, go out to Alain, Jean-Marc, Vincent, Peter, Vincent, Jon, David, Myriam and Patrick. We’ll be in touch.

And now for something completely different.

For years I have been practising various aspects of agile software development, commonly used in speech technology projects. Short iterations, test-driven development, self-organising teams: been there, done that. But explaining how and why to other people wasn’t always easy. So after a brief lookout, I decided to further consolidate my agile knowledge by taking the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course and exam. Which I did last week and today, respectively.

The 61 multiple choice questions took about 35 minutes to answer. Thanks to an acceptable score, I was able to add another acronym to my CV. So if you’re looking for a CSM with MBA, MA and MSc degrees who is certified in VXML and knows how to program a.o. in PHP, do send me an SMS.

After previous editions in Silicon Valley, the widely acclaimed eComm conference is now coming to Europe! If there’s one conference that European telecom innovators and strategists shouldn’t miss, this is it. See you in Amsterdam?

This week’s issue of Vacature Magazine (Belgium’s most widely circulated HR magazine) features an interview (in Dutch) with two fellow managers and myself about the question: does an MBA repay itself?

The obvious answer is: it depends. The most important payback factors are timing, personal drive & involvement, and immediate on-the-job applicability. My activities today are largely based on the business plan I wrote as my final MBA project at Vlerick Leuven Ghent Management School. So the decision back in 2002 to pursue an MBA has certainly steered my life in its current direction. But that’s true for any decision, of course. Time is unidirectional, without backtracking, so what-if questions are largely irrelevant.

This being said, the philosophical answer is: if you feel you need an MBA, find a program that suits you, get qualified, and then go for it. Don’t let the future happen, make it happen.

Or, as William of Orange said: One need not hope in order to undertake; nor succeed in order to persevere.

Last Tuesday at the iMinds conference in Ghent my speech application prototype with realtime Belgian train times got a Bronze INCA Award. Here’s what the jury had to say:

A practical application shows the clear potential for new applications by voice via any phone using public data and open APIs (that are unfortunately not available yet).

About 25% of my code and time was indeed spent on the development of an (obviously) invisible screen-scraping Web service layer on top of www.railtime.be. Judgeing from the feedback I got before, during and after iMinds, there would have been 5 or 10 times as many public transport related INCA submissions, if only Infrabel, De Lijn, MIVB etcetera had done the effort of opening up their internal web services to the development community.

So, in case the folks at IBBT and the newly to-be-elected politicians are looking for a low-cost initiative with an immediate impact on innovation and value creation in the local ICT sector: have the Belgian and Flemish government agencies and companies open up their data. Make this your top priority for this year. No, this month. No, this week!

Since the train delay voice application demo submitted for the INCA Award does not only exist in Dutch, I thought a French video was also in order. Here it is:

Yesterday afternoon I submitted my proposal for the INCA Award. Read all about it on http://traininfo.i-speech.com/.

Or just watch this video:

In two weeks’s time the Flemish Institute for BroadBand Technology (IBBT) is hosting a new networking event called iMinds. This conference is the sequel of the 5-year old IBBT Brokerage event.

What’s more, IBBT also announced an excellent new initiative for innovative developers: the INCA Awards, with €20K in prize money. The deadline for submission is tomorrow evening – still working on my project! The winners will be awarded at the same iMinds conference on May 12.

See you in Ghent!

Unlike last year, I wasn’t able to make it to the eComm09 conference in Silicon Valley. Neither was Martin Geddes, Head of Strategy at BT Design, but he was kind enough to record and publish his keynote address:

Required listening for all telco & call centre strategists!

See the Plugg website for more details on this European Web startup conference. I’ll be there.

Two of my favourite companies in the speech-driven call automation field today announced their union. By acquiring VoiceObjects of Cologne, Germany, the American voice hosting company Voxeo further expands its presence in mainland Europe.

Voxeo of Orlando, Florida runs the world’s largest VoiceXML platform and is reputed for its extreme service. Three years ago I had the pleasure to work with them while developing the now defunct Beavis and Butthead hotline. I was just as impressed with the stability of their platform as with the professionalism and accessibility of their staff, up to and including CEO Jonathan Taylor.

In summer 2004, just after I started as an independent consultant in this business, VoiceObjects was so kind as to offer me a free voucher for their Consulting Partner Certification. Apart from this gesture, I also appreciated the flexibility and ease of use of their eponymous flagship product which greatly simplifies the development of multilingual speech applications.

Developers like me will surely welcome the announcement that “VoiceObjects will also be available in extremely cost-effective on-demand and on-premise offerings bundled with Voxeo’s own Prophecy VoiceXML Platform.”

About 175 professionals from the Dutch-speaking speech & language technology community gathered in Brussels yesterday for the second edition of Taal In Bedrijf (”Language At Work”). The main goals of the event were to present results from the government-sponsored STEVIN program, to poll for remaining needs in and around the field, and to reflect on the best way to address those needs in post-STEVIN times.

The morning sessions focused on practical applications of Dutch speech and language technology in diverse areas such as multimedia, games, written communication, E-government, E-health, E-learning, (semi-)automated translation, mobility, logistics, and business intelligence. Quite a few of the applications presented have been or are being developed under STEVIN’s demonstrator subprogram, which attracted one million euro, or 8.7% of the total 5-year STEVIN budget.

The breadth and versatility of speech and language technology makes that it is almost always combined with other technologies, as part of a broader solution. As a result, the speech & language technology field as a whole is somewhat diffuse and difficult to grasp to outsiders. During my presentation, I therefore pleaded in metaphorical terms for a “TST Inside” logo (TST = Taal- en SpraakTechnologie) to improve the visibility and accessibility of technological resources like parsers, recognizers, spoken and written corpora, grammars or ontologies. More practically speaking: if we want our companies and fellow citizens to know and use our beloved tools & techniques, this is the time for existing distribution agencies like the TST-Centrale to step up, enter the front-stage and play a more pro-active and visible role. This extension of duties may require an organizational upgrade from its current project status within the INL to an autonomous agency with clear strategies, budgets, targets, plus travelling sales people, lobbyists, and … its own website!

As for the Dutch and Flemish governments’ role, their classic function as subsidizer can be complemented as well. For a start, government departments and public companies (in the European sense) could take the lead themselves and apply speech and language technology in their own daily operations. There is still a lot of low-hanging fruit to be picked in this area, especially in Flanders. Three examples, to name just those: De Lijn (public transport company), the Vlaamse Infolijn (general number for government inquiries), or VDAB (Flemish Work Agency).

Another recommendation for the Flemish speech & language field is to structurally organize ourselves, like our Dutch friends from NOTAS already started doing … seven years ago. My own positive experience with the Speech Technology Workgroup within ContactCentres.be -thank you, Peter Edel, for the presentation yesterday- has shown that self-organization is a necessary condition to create a sector in the minds of innovation managers and other decision makers. As any marketing student can tell: if our customers can’t mentally locate us, we don’t exist.

So let’s keep up the good work, and make some (more) noise. Oh yeah, and keep on improving our technologies. But that’s another discussion.

Ten days ago the third edition of Philippe Poux‘ brainchild VocalExpo was held at the CNIT La Défense in Paris, France. VocalExpo brings together industry professionals and customers in the French (speaking) market active at the interface of speech technology and customer relationship management. Paris is only an 80 minute Thalys trip away from Brussels, so your servant was there.

The name of the exposition hall was Darwin. Aptly chosen, as the history of speech technology is an evolutionary tale, with predator companies eating smaller species – see Nuance’s recent acquisition of Philips Speech Recognition Systems – and new technologies and applications seeing the light at an ever increasing pace. One basic technology that has acquired a prominent place today in many companies’ offerings is voice biometrics – more on this below. Another trend in the making is that the web browser will gain in importance as a natural interface for voice input, to the detriment of the plain phone. Atos Worldline demoed a browser-based virtual contact centre, written in Flex. The solution allows customers to contact a company’s helpdesk right from their web browser, providing a rich interaction which includes chat & voice, document sharing, and co-browsing. In the demo I tried, it was another person pushing the buttons on the other side of the link. But with an IVVR system at the back-end, the opportunities for multi-channel customer service are only bounded by imagination. The major blocking factors I see for large-scale adoption are customer inertia, lack of usability and lack of security, none of which are insurmountable.

Speaking of security and authentication, the most interesting part of the day was the panel discussion on voice biometrics featuring Alexander Huggins from Nuance, François Chaffard from Prosodie, who also represented Voice.Trust in this panel, and finally Ariane Nabeth-Halber, Technical Director NaturalVoice at Hotline. The adoption of voice biometrics in France is hampered somewhat by regulation from the French privacy authorities requiring a case-by-case authorization to use the technology, as well as the explicit agreement of company personnel representatives and the individual users. On the technical side, there were some critical remarks on the alleged immaturity and incompleteness of the MRCP v2 standard, which slows down technical integration of speaker verification engines in a VoiceXML application environment. This being said, the basic voice biometrics technology itself has been around for quite a number of years already and is certainly deemed mature enough for large-scale deployment. Ms. Nabeth-Halber was keen to stress that the balance between security and convenience is also a matter of good VUI design and adaptive dialogs: for example, callers authenticated through their voice and their phone number can pass right away, whereas grey-zone cases do get a second question to answer. The application context which defines the monetary cost of false acceptances versus false rejections is also of prime importance in setting the correct verification thresholds.

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Under the auspices of the Taalunie (= [Dutch] Language Union), the Dutch-speaking speech & language industry from The Netherlands and Flanders will meet in Brussels on November 19, 2008 for the second edition of Taal In Bedrijf (best translated as “Language At Work”). The first, 2005 edition in Eindhoven attracted 290 professionals from academia and industry.

I have gladly accepted to moderate the afternoon plenary discussions on the continuation of a joint Dutch/Flemish Speech and Language Technology programme.

See the Voice Days website, as well as my report from the 2007 edition. Note this year’s conference won’t be held in Bonn, but in Wiesbaden.