Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Microsoft has been adding and improving speech recognition in a variety of its products and services. Cloud-based recognition is expected to push the technology even further along.
Microsoft's 2007 acquisition of voice service provider Tellme Networks is beginning to pay off.
The fruits of the expanded (and renamed) Speech at Microsoft group are starting to appear in products.
Scheduled to debut early next month, Exchange Server 2010 will deliver text previews of voice mail messages in users' inboxes.
This will provide a faster and more discreet way of checking voice mails.
"For me, this feature is invaluable during meetings or other situations when actually listening to voice mail is not a viable option," said Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president of Microsoft Exchange.
Voice recognition is also showing up in Microsoft's Bing search engine. Bing 411 (1-800-Bing-411 in the US) lets users say what they're searching for and either listen to the results or receive a text message for later reference.
And there's also the Bing for Mobile application for Windows phones that provides voice-enabled search.
"When you're on the go, using only keystrokes to search can be cumbersome, especially if you’re multi-tasking. It takes over 20 strokes of the keypad to find a restaurant on the Web," said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the Microsoft's online services division.
"With Bing for Mobile or Bing 411, you simply speak your query to get results quickly, easily and safely. Using your voice to simply 'say what you want and get it' helps you do more when you're in a mobile scenario," he added.
Other applications of speech technology from Microsoft include the improved speech recognition in Windows 7, and the Tellme platform's outbound interactive voice response service.
Looking into the future, Microsoft foreshadows cloud-based systems that come close to matching humans' ability to recognise and understand speech.
"Speech belongs in the cloud. Only there can you reach the scale, the enormous volume of interactions required to create a speech system capable of rivaling human understanding," said Larry Heck, the recently appointed chief scientist within Speech at Microsoft.
David Bass
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