Aug
14
Speech is the Future of Search
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data protection, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Here is an extract from a story carried by the International Herald Tribune on 14 August 2012;
august 14, 2012
Quaid’s speech calling for religious, ethnic tolerance missing from Radio Pakistan’s archives.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s landmark speech at the Constituent Assembly’s
first meeting on August 11, 1947 in Karachi has been missing for decades
and all recent efforts to retrieve it have so far been in vain.
These days, Radio Pakistan runs an Urdu translation recorded in
somebody else’s voice of the same speech. Where the original speech
disappeared, and whether this was deliberate, remains an unanswered
question.
It may be no coincidence that the missing speech has these famous
words in it: “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are
free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this
state of Pakistan …You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that
has nothing to do with the business of the state.”
It was also in this speech that the founder had said that the first
duty of a government was to maintain law and order, “so that the life,
property and religious beliefs of its subjects are fully protected by
the state.”
Important words, and never more so than at this time. And almost certainly not lost – mislabelled, misfiled, disguised by inadequate metadata, maybe, but it is worth a small wager that the speech turns up one day – so very many things do. The world is full of attics and libraries from which lost symphonies, early works of poetry, the juvenilia of great writers reappear with monotonous regularity. This speech will be found.
But the story interested me because it provided a graphic reminder of the problem and potential of speech, and returned me to a long held conviction – that voice is the real future of search. However, I no longer believe that the route to this is through Google and the other search engines. though I am aware of Google’s downloadable voice search app, and I am sure that the pace set in this area will accelerate as Google get even further invested in the future of the smart phone. However, we need semantic technologies that can treat text as voice and vice versa for search purposes, and while we have evidence of many attributes in this pipeline, we seem to be a long way away from finding a universal solution, and one that resolves the legacy content issues as well.
I am coming to believe, however, in the explosive growth potential for voice in business, partly because of Siri and its ilk, partly because of the need to get more functionality into the phone than the keyboard will allow, but mostly because I can now see a group of very relevant business areas where being able to move seamlessly from voice to text, to be able to search both using either, unlocks productivity gains that cannot be attained in any other way. My conclusions on this were formed by following two companies quite closely. One was Aurix (www.aurix.com), a former UK Defense establishment company privatized within QinetiQ and now owned by Avaya. No prizes for guessing where their voice interests began, but their interests now lie far beyond security and intelligence. The other is BigHand (http://uk.bighand.com), bought earlier this year by my colleagues at Bridgepoint, where I do some media advisory work. It happens that both of these are UK technology companies, but I am sure that we could find equivalents for them in the USA or Israel.
Clearly a vital sector for voice search remains security. Searching voicemail alone when required is a major undertaking (not even the News of the World in its prime had the right technologies). Beyond this, media and broadcasting is surely a primary market. No one who drowned in the ocean of superlatives surrounding the London Olympics can doubt that heavyweight voice technologies of the sort that Aurix deploys will be as critical as the major investment put together by the BBC, partnering with MarkLogic, to put in the text-image-video handling platform that sat behind the BBC Sport website. And then we put together the fastest growing sector – monitoring and searching voice messages, recorded conversations and realtime calling in direct selling and customer service contexts. The productivity gains are as large as the range of uses is wide – checking compliance and script adherence, learning from common complaints, measuring call centre workloads, analysing trends in customer response etc etc.
And there are two marketplaces where voice records, the ability to attach them to text records, and to search both at the same time, has always been important, even when it wasn’t possible. One is the law practice market, and the other is the health market. Here there are solid traditions of voice recording, but real productivity gains to be made (for example, in legal eDiscovery) by using effective voice search. BigHand are market leaders in legal dictation and have the exciting prospect before them of what seemed a limited market a few years ago now opening out in an interesting way to embrace technology change which will then move into education (voice reports?), surveying, engineering and then some of the science research disciplines. As a law database publisher in 1982, I now have the delightful prospect of seeing another wave come ashore in the same market with very similar productivity, and compliance, advantages.
So here then is a brief sketch of a demand-led digital voice revolution. In 2020 we will ask our screen for research results, and define if we want them by ear or by eye – bearing in mind that some of the results will be transcripted voice turned into text, and others will be text turned into speech. Around then we shall find the missing speech in this news story – and admire again the wonderful sentiments of the speaker.
Jul
30
Good Bank, Bad Bank, Big Bank, Sad Bank
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, online advertising, Pearson, Publishing, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
From Olympic Exile on the splendid South Shore of Nova Scotia, I can observe that the banking crisis continues apace, and that the original Swedish solution – put all the smelly bits into a special container called a Bad Bank and cut it free from the Mother Ship – still holds great appeal. I can also see that the financial market analyst demand to cut media companies up into “high growth, strong margins” companies and “low growth, declining margin” companies also has great appeal. We have seen it with McGraw-Hill and now with News International. The equity market analyst’s view (and media markets are almost always at their most dangerous when those who lead companies feel forced to follow the views of those ultimate exemplars of power without responsibility – or experience) seems to be at the moment that the assets which have responded least well to the digital revolution, or have been slowest to react, should be cordoned off and cut free. Very strange: I thought the whole idea of “portfolio” in media ownership was that assets developed at different speeds, and the fast growth ones thus gave “cover” – time and capital – to allow low growth assets to become fast growth again – perhaps with the help of judicious bolt – on acquisition on the way.
And then there is the question of cycles. Some of us apparently work in mini-cycles – the turn of markets within an 18 month period according to an analyst friend – while others are “macro-cycle minded”, which is where I am apparently involved. So if I thought that the reason for McGrawHill to hold onto its Education division was that education, alongside Healthcare, is the most enduring long term growth market we have, and that the portfolio duty of Standard and Poor’s was to enable McGraw’s education unit to get back on its feet, challenge Pearson’s leadership and buy the right catalytic add-on, then I was clearly wrong. Yet it seems to me clear that the future of rating agencies is quite as murky, from both a regulatory as well as a digital standpoint, as any other market. And is McGraw’s B2B, despite some distinguished work, really in the forefront of digital services and solutions in its verticals? Yet these are Good Bank assets, and Education is Bad Bank.
I could write the same about News Corp, television and newspapers. I am certain that no broadcast media have really absorbed the meaning of a networked society, and this is as true of the world of TV stations and cable companies as it is true of newspapers. Of course, one way around the problem is to sell while the going is good, as DMGT so signally failed to do in 2008 when they refused an offer of £1 billion for Northcliffe (regional press), an asset worth around £250m today. Sentiment forbade such a move as it once did at News Corp, so are players like DMGT destined to split to please investors? Apart from my respect for the bravery and ability to change involved in creating new B2B orientated DMGT out of old newspaper DMGT. who is to say that here no digital local manifestation can be created which will not replace traditional local newspapers? And how valuable, since they have them, would those local brands and franchises become in the new local? Especially at helping bits of B2B2C in markets like property reach ultimate consumers.
And where does the splitting end? The arguments that apply here apply equally to the Guardian Media Group, and are complicated by the fact that one investment made to give cover for the newspapers, EMAP, has faded faster than the newspapers themselves. Hopefully selling its half share of this and Autotrader will adjust the losses, and digital revenues (now up to £14.7 m and growing by 26% this year) will do the rest. But here we hit another problem: digital businesses may be more profitable, but they are also smaller. Digital newspaper ad revenue (Mail Online now stands at a forecast of £327m, with a target of £45 m in 2013) models are small, as are paywall models (Times Online now reaches £27m pa after a price hike) And the story of digital books is “less revenue, more margin, cannibalising customers to create a slightly smaller, slightly more profitable company”. What happens when we finish that short cycle?
Maybe the answer to the scale problem is that scale is becoming less important anyway. In a digital world if you have 50% of the workflow and solutions business in agriculture, why should you be in the same group as a content provider to the oil industry? Certainly our current ideas of scale came directly from the print world – you needed to be big enough to finance print runs that took, a day, a week or a year to sell. The cash flow model demanded scale. This is not so today, though I can well imagine a world where deploying common (and very expensive) technologies and having sufficient internal know-how to do so becomes a scale argument. Few B2B players “re-platforming” these days can be doing so, at quite a modest scale, at less than $1.5 m, even if their content is already in good XML order. Larger players face bigger bills, and these will be ongoing as we all go semantic web and Big Data. Then again you may need to be big to finance this as well as investing in collaboration with third parties – content-sharing, delivery mechanism-sharing, solution-sharing. And you may need to be big and diversified to fight off the next round of investors in this sector – the enterprize software vendors who will want to add your B2B solutions to their architecture (or maybe you will need to be big enough to attract them: it can be hard to tell).
So settle back for summer and await the next wave of splits rumours. Back to splitting up Informa? EMAP is already, like Gaul, divided into three parts and ready for resale. Pearson should certainly, in the analysts view, sell Penguin and the FT (despite the fact that they are appreciating nicely now, and they will only be needed as a votive offering to the markets when their sale can finance the next big education push/acquisition). Surely Wolters Kluwer should be subject to this one too – financial analysts sought the sale of its education and its academic publishing assets, and, having succeeded, still hunger for the news that Health is being sold away from law and tax.
Or maybe we should say that it is customer markets that change the size and scale of assets, not investment analysts who have a key interest in the outcomes that they recommend. Maybe we would get richer listening to our customers than listening to these back seat drivers?
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