The Wireless Blog

By Brad Smith

I know texting, also called SMS by some of us, is a huge phenomenon. According to VeriSign, some 2.2 billion mobile messages were sent last Valentine’s Day. Who knows how many SMS messages are sent in a year?

But when it comes to communications, voice is still No. 1. That’s why voice applications on mobile phones have always intrigued me. Everyone talks about the strides being made in the user interface by Apple’s iPhone, but voice will always be the most intuitive UI there is. With one caveat – getting the voice UI to work with the device itself. That hasn’t always been so intuitive.

I had a sit-down recently with Mike Wehrs, the vice president and chief evangelist for Nuance Communications’ mobile business. Wehrs demonstrated Nuance’s latest voice applications on a number of handsets, plus some that are soon to be released.

Most of Nuance’s voice applications are associated with smartphones running an open operating system like Symbian S60, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm and BlackBerry. But Wehrs showed me how the applications could run on a fairly basic handset running an OEM’s proprietary OS. The demo used a basic Samsung device but won’t be available for sometime on handsets sold in the stores or through carriers. Wehrs thinks details about handset OEMs using the software may be announced at next September’s CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment show.

Nuance Voice Control lets you use your voice for a variety of things – navigate through menus, make searches on the Internet, send and respond to text messages. Wehrs looked up (is look up the right term when you’re using your voice) a listing for all the Kinko’s in the Denver area using Voice Control. He also found a list of Chinese restaurants by just asking for it.

Wehr also showed how you can dictate an SMS into your phone, have it converted and sent as text. The receiver can also have the SMS delivered as voice. In the next few weeks, Nuance and a carrier will announce the launch of its Voicemail to Text service, which lets subscribers read voicemail messages either via SMS or e-mail. Nuance announced the service at CTIA in April, but the carrier has been under wraps.

Nuance isn’t alone in this area, of course. SpinVox has been getting a lot of press for its Voice-to-Screen messaging. The company says it expects to have six million users for the application by the end of June.

Voice applications have been around for years, first for basic operations like directory searches or accessing contacts or phone numbers. But it looks like a wider universe of voice applications is starting to catch hold.