Please speak up! – Voice search is growing fast…

Due to a genetic curse that has plagued my family for generations, I have impaired hearing (well before natural ageing determines that I should have anyway). It’s probably not the sort of thing (along with politics, religion and relationships) that I should be discussing on a blog site. However, the simple fact is that this growing disability has driven my interest in web and communications technology and, on that basis, has actually enhanced rather than damaged my career so far.

Having seen my father’s career impacted badly by not being able to communicate effectively in an office environment I was naturally very keen to understand how and where things like email, the web and instant messaging could help me, as and when traditional communications such as the telephone became difficult to use.

speakupSimilarly, I have always kept a close eye on things like voice-to-text translation. Watching my father and aunt trying to communicate these days would illustrate why. Neither of them has any natural hearing left and even the most advanced digital hearing aids are not much use to them anymore. So they have to communicate using a combination of lip reading and pen and paper – which is not the most conducive way to have a meaningful and useful discussion.

During my time at Lucent, I worked on a couple of projects to help explain and communicate VoiceXML concepts. This is basically the ability to drive mobile phone functions by voice which has been adopted by most operators in some form to help users navigate through multiple options, particularly in hands-free usage.

A few years later, at the hosted services company I worked for, I was promoting the use of SpinVox, a service that converts voice messages into SMS and email and does so surprisingly well too.

However, when I suggested a couple of years ago now that the rise of sophisticated mobile apps might mean people being able to speak content into their content management systems in the future and control its publication via voice – suffice it to say it the idea was met with stony silence.

It’s therefore with both personal and professional interest that coverage of Google comments at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo have focused on its announcement that it believes “Voice search is a new form of search and that it is core to our business” and to support that statement the Google representative, Vic Gundotra said “I get the advantage of looking at daily voice queries coming in and it’s amazing. It’s working. It’s reached a tipping point. It’s growing and growing very, very fast and we are thrilled about it,”

Interestingly its uptake as an iPhone app is being credited with this growth and, as it is one of those developments that improves as more people use it, then it looks like this an area destined for bigger and better things. I can already see the potential for an iPhone type device to give a real time text view of what someone is saying to me, as and when hearing aids can no longer provide any benefit. With 9 million hearing impaired people in the UK alone and an iPod generation merrily destroying their hearing prematurely – it looks like a potentially big market. If a developer’s not already buried in the iPhone SDK doing this already then there’s an idea for free. Just send me a note when it’s ready – don’t bother calling as I don’t hear the phone ring 😉

Mob Rule 2.0…

“Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better.”
– Anonymous

I liked the above quote, spotted on my iGoogle page over the weekend. Current events certainly illustrate that no matter how smart and sophisticated we think we are, we seem destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. Remember Gordon Brown’s classic sound bite from his time as Chancellor “No more boom and bust”? Hmmm – foolish words in retrospect as he presides over what is looking like the biggest boom and bust in history. But foolish words also if he really thought that the human population had suddenly forsaken greed and everyone could be trusted to manage their own financial affairs without getting themselves into hideous, unsustainable debt.

When I was looking back to 2020 BC last week it was interesting to remind myself of some of the Egyptian history and legacy. There were 31 Egyptian dynasties stretching over 3000 years – the year 2020 was at the start of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ that lasted for 400 years and the Great Pyramid of Giza had already been in existence for over 500 years. Egyptian society was very structured with food and wealth collected centrally and then redistributed in payment for work. Men and women had equal rights and all levels of society had the right to appeal against rulings they thought unjust. Look around the world today – particularly at countries in turmoil – and invariably that last statement cannot be applied and is often the root cause of the problems.

The Greek and Roman civilisations are credited with the development of democracy but it wasn’t to re-emerge and rise again until the 17th Century. However, linked to the primitive democracies of the ancient world is also the concept of ‘mob rule’. Athenian Democracy is perhaps the most documented of ancient democratic movements but was twice interrupted by what the Greeks termed Ochlocracy – which was essentially government by a mass of people through the intimidation of constitutional authorities.  You may also remember in the film Gladiator, the emperor Commodus orders 180 days of gladiatorial games to keep ‘the mob’ happy and distracted from rising social unrest.
The term ‘mob’ originally derives from the Latin phrase mobile vulgus meaning ‘the easily moveable crowd’. In many cases, a mob, however massive, may not be representative of the often silent majority – particularly in large societies that are based on representative democracy.

mobIs history repeating itself once again? Our global crisis appears to be inciting ‘mob rule’ on a global scale. Firstly we have ‘the mob’ baying for the blood of the bankers the world over and our elected politicians who are, by and large, complicit in this debacle echoing ‘the mob’ and feeding its anger still further as if to distract from their own culpability. And then you have the appeasement – Politicians using money that they don’t have to keep the mob happy and reduce the possibility of social unrest on their watch whilst building up a bill that will still have to paid on someone else’s.

The term ‘social media’ has been coined to describe the rise of blogging (macro and micro) and networking sites such as myspace and facebook. However, there is often comment about how representative these environments actually are. True, there are many millions of blogs out there but how many are actually active and how many of the active ones are the mouthpieces of vocal minorities not bound by the journalistic conventions of the mainstream media? Does the ‘mass voice’ of the Twitterverse lead to a dumbing down of political agendas as cited here? Can the classic line from Gladiator – “Rome is the mob” be applied to the contemporary world – “Twitter is the mob”?

Looking back to 2020…

This last week seems to have dominated by Egyptian themes and it’s got me looking back to the last 2020 (BC) as opposed to looking forward to the next 2020.

My youngest daughter’s all time favourite programme ‘Primeval’ returned to our screens on Saturday night. The new episode was set in the Egyptian wing of the British Museum and it reminded me of being in awe of the Egyptian artefacts when I first saw them on a trip to the museum when I was at primary school. On a more recent trip a few years ago I remember that, aside from the architectural marvel of the Museum’s glass roof, the Egyptian wing was the undoubted highlight – as indeed have been similar exhibits in the New York Met and the Louvre.

Earlier in the week I watched a documentary which was about the theories of a French Architect who has devoted 7 years of his life since the turn of this century, using 3D software to painstakingly model how the great pyramids could have been built .

Firstly I found it staggering that the ingenuity of humans 4000 years ago, when the population of the world was equal to half the population of the UK today (around 35 million), was such that we are still trying to figure out how they did these amazing things.

Besides this architect’s ‘internal ramp’ theory (which density scans conducted in previous investigations show could well be the most feasible explanation for how massive blocks were carried to the top of the structures) the explanation for how even more massive single blocks of granite were manoeuvred into place above the main burial chambers using a complex counter weight system was even more inspiring.

egyptian_templeThen, a couple of days ago, I settled down to open the latest National Geographic magazine and its lead article is about Hatshepsut – a woman in the Egyptian royal bloodline who decided to rule as a King rather than as a Queen.
Aside from this quirk that has fascinated archaeologists for years and led to a ‘Indiana Jones’ type quest to locate her Mummy (which was finally discovered a couple of years ago and confirmed her gender) Hatshepsut was responsible for many architectural wonders including his/her temple at Deir el-Bahri. This location has become notorious for the terrorist attack on tourists in 1997 when 62 people were massacred but aside from this bloody recent history, the architectural beauty of the structure would not look out of place in the modern world 4000 years on.

You can't predict the future…

 The writer Arthur C. Clarke said, “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

As this list of failed technology predictions shows we get it wrong when imagining the future because the starting point for our predictions is invariably what we know and feel today. However, we also know that the future will be full of surprises as unexpected discoveries are latched onto and take things in completely unpredictable directions.

The launch of the UK version of Wired this week shows that presumably there is an interest and appetite in looking ahead and I think with all the doom and gloom around right now it’s important to be looking towards a better future.

cougar_aceI read the sample copy that came with the Times at the weekend and there are some interesting features in the first issue, including a timeline of potential developments over the next few decades. The article that will get me buying the first issue though (as I’m sure was the strategy of the Editor) is the true account of the Cougar Ace a massive carrier ship that was rescued in a complex salvage operation a few years back. Apparently Steven Spielberg has bought the rights to the story and just from reading the sample article I can see what a good film the story could make.

Getting more for your money…

Having been in the midst of the both the dotcom boom and bust, I get a sense that technology companies will generally fair better than most during this current downturn. And with the likes of Google prepared to invest some of its many billions to keep the venture capital flowing then hopefully the pace of innovation seen in recent years will keep momentum too.

The dotcom boom saw technology companies grow at staggering rates due, in a large part, to ‘irrational exuberance’ that fuelled an unrealistic bubble. There were undoubtedly inflated expectations of what the web and its associated developments could deliver in the short-term. However, there was a lot of substance in many of the ideas at that time but some serious over-estimations of how quickly they could be realised.

Technology companies felt an enormous amount of pain in the bust period, which started in earnest in 2001, and many were still hurting 4 years on. The company I was working for during most of this period shed a staggering 120,000 jobs in wave after wave of redundancies. Ironically that worked in favour of the Enterprise Content Management deployment I was involved in at the time as consolidation of the company’s thousands of web and intranet sites was well overdue and couldn’t be argued with in those economic circumstances – So there are often upsides even in the worst of circumstances.

The benefit and potential of web technologies has very much been proven in the years following the bust and right now I’m certainly seeing signs of organisations being more prepared to spend in this area to get more efficient and competitive. A number of digital agencies I’ve been speaking with recently are reporting a rush to digital and business growing rather than contracting.

cost_cuttingLooking further afield, the launch of Windows 7  will be interesting. Like many, I saw very little point in upgrading to Vista and have not used a business or home machine with Vista installed on it since its release at the beginning of 2007. So how is Microsoft going to make its latest OS more attractive, particularly at a time when both organisations and consumers are cutting spending?  One of the more recent announcements that seems to have attracted interest is that Windows 7 will enable you to remove Internet Explorer. I guess that just shows the strength of feeling about Microsoft monopolising the desktop environment and eagerness to have more choice. To be honest I haven’t even given IE8 a single thought with regard to my home pcs.

With the steady development of web based applications, like Zoho, and companies like Dell offering low cost pcs with Ubuntu  (the Open Source operating system) it’s looking easier and easier to live without Microsoft. Although when I look at the level of indoctrination of younger generations Microsoft has achieved with its shrewd product positioning in education then it looks like its domination of the desktop is assured for a number of years to come.

Having worked for a hosted services company, I am a ‘Software as a Service’  (SaaS) advocate and it’s clear that observers and commentators are heralding new waves of interest in cloud computing, web 2.0 and virtualisation as organisation come under greater pressure to cut costs.

Personally I still believe the biggest barrier to broader adoption of SaaS is the idea of someone else having responsibility for your data. However, when you look at the poor security and privacy processes and lack of business continuity planning in many organisations, both large and small, they’d be doing themselves a favour in adopting SaaS. Sometimes though, SaaS providers do themselves no favours in perpetuating unsubstantiated claims as illustrated here in the 80% myth.