This week Microsoft has licenced Vocalocity’s VoiceXML technology for use in future versions of its Speech Server product. Interested developers can sign up for a beta version of Speech Server 2007 as of today.
With this move, Microsoft finally recognizes the primary status of VoiceXML, a W3C standard, as the lingua franca for speech enabled phone applications. Speech technology buyers can now focus on development environment capabilities or partner application availabilities without having to make a core language choice (VoiceXML vs. SALT) at the same time. Less uncertainty means faster decisions, so faster market development.
After last year’s merger of Nuance and Scansoft (the latter already including a.o. SpeechWorks, Philips Speech Processing, and Rhetorical Systems), the industry is now witnessing another consolidation: Genesys, an Alcatel company, this week acquired VoiceGenie, a major VoiceXML platform vendor (aka voice portal provider). According to the press release, the takeover is expected to “accelerate the trend away from legacy, proprietary IVRs (interactive voice response) to new Voice XML software standards”.
Apart from the obvious market defragmentation effect, it will be interesting to see the influence of the take-over on the status of Genesys Voice Portal (GVP), which evolved from the Telera acquisition back in 2002. More important for market acceleration, though, is the availability (also in pricing terms) of state-of-the-art development environments. In that respect, the acquisition of VoiceGenie does not add much value; frustrated users of Genesys Studio like myself would have preferred an acquisition of Audium or VoiceObjects, to name just those two. We will see what the future holds.
The boldest move so far this year on the platform commoditization front came from Voxeo. Two months ago they launched Prophecy, which was recently certified as the first 100% compliant VoiceXML 2.0 platform. Prophecy comes with a built-in ASR and TTS server, but also supports external speech servers through its MRCP client. The platform is free (as in free beer) for development purposes.
Standardization, consolidation, and commoditization are the traditional features of a maturing industry.
