No pricing is available but Steve Chambers, president of the Nuance Mobile business unit has demonstrated Open vSearch (or OVS) speech-enabling Web search on the iPhone. A demo can be seen here. While it is not substantially different from the offerings of Vlingo, V-ENABLE or Microsoft Live Search in terms of using speech input and distributed speech processing (DSP) to recognize utterances and populate a search box, it is no coincidence that the announcement coincides with Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) here in San Francisco.
It was at WWDC yesterday that Steve Jobs announced the new, 3G-compliant, less expensive iPhone and began enticing Apple’s true believers with the capabilities of a faster data link, longer battery life, GPS and a larger user base (thanks to the lower price). We expect to see some formidable new speech-enabled multimodal applications for the new generation of iPhones. It’s impact far exceeds the share of the mobile subscriber base.
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P.S. from Greg: I’ve been using the Microsoft Live Search application with voice much more recently and have become very pleased with the performance. Voice/speech of course addresses many of the shortcomings of keypad entry on mobile phones, although it’s imperfect. It also helps drive consumer search volume as well because of the reduced “friction.”