From Speech Strategy News, May 2008

Editor’s Notes

CTIA Wireless and Mobile Future conferences

Bill Meisel, Publisher & Editor

CTIA Wireless 2008 at the Las Vegas Convention Center April 1 – 3 was one of those big shows that require logistical heroism for both the organizers and the attendees, with 40,000 attendees from 125 countries and over 1,200 exhibitors. The content of the show ranges from wireless infrastructure equipment to mobile phones to content and application providers. In contrast to the huge CTIA show, a much smaller conference on April 22 in Santa Clara, California (with perhaps 200 attendees) was organized by Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley and UC Berkeley’s Fisher IT Center at the Haas School of Business. Titled “The Mobile Future,” the conference focused on where the industry is going, rather than where it is now.

CTIA Wireless 2008

Two contrasting attitudes toward speech technology were reflected in the keynotes and educational tracks at CTIA:

o        The mobile phone is basically a small PC: Vendors realize the potential for the mobile phone to do more than communicate by voice. In particular, the mobile phone is seen as a gateway for all the applications, entertainment, and data on the Web. The bulk of the discussion focused on how to make the full web accessible on the device, ignoring, in my opinion, the fact that (1) the mobile phone has a very small screen relative to the PC, (2) pointing and text entry are more difficult, and (3) every mobile phone, unlike every PC, has a microphone. Another prejudice was the view of the “mobile Web” as being purely a creature of the data channel, ignoring the possibility of the voice channel achieving some of the same objectives (perhaps with the results of voice requests being delivered as a text message, not necessarily by voice). Mobile phones with touch screens, perhaps motivated by the success of Apple’s iPhone, were a feature of a number of new phones introduced at the show (p. 47). One speaker made the point that one should distinguish the developed world from the developing world; for the latter, the wireless phone might be the owner’s only connection to the Internet. (During a Q&A session for one panel on making the mobile Web more usable that ignored speech input, I asked, “Did anyone notice that every mobile phone has a microphone?”)

o        The mobile phone is fundamentally a different experience than using a PC: This alternative point of view was expressed in a minority of talks. The clearest example of the adoption of speech input was Yahoo’s announcement and demonstration of its voice search option in a keynote address (p. 1). First, Yahoo argued that, whatever the form of a search entry, the mobile phone demands more focused results—a shorter list with an effort to use whatever means possible (including location information, for example) to make each entry highly relevant—“answers” versus lists. Second, in order to achieve this objective, one needs to collect as much information as possible in the first entry, motivating speech entry that encourages the providing of the full search request as a single entry. There were, of course, other services and applications that used speech recognition and text-to-speech technology as fundamental aspects of their user interface.

Most talks suggested that the mobile phone will continue to support additional functions, both within the phone and in the network, and become increasingly indispensible to users, as one might expect. The industry expects the current rapid growth in adoption of mobile phones to increase, with one speaker noting that there are expected to be four times the number of mobile phones than PCs by 2010. Unlimited calling plans were news, and may also increase the use of automated and data services, as the cost of using them becomes incrementally zero.

The Mobile Future conference

The following subsections summarize the main themes and controversies of the Mobile Future conference.

The fractionated mobile platform environment

Anyone who wants to develop an application with software on a mobile phone faces a wide variety of targets that forces them either to limit the phones that can use their product or spend a great deal to develop versions for a variety of operating systems (e.g., Symbian, Microsoft Windows Mobile, variations of Linux) and middleware (e.g., the proposed Google Phone software or Java Mobile Edition, the latter of which was said to have many versions).

Apple was cited as an interesting special case; the Apple iPhone offers a potentially large enough user base in the long run to be a target platform for developers (although only AT&T offers the iPhone, and Apple exercises control over what Application Programming Interfaces it exposes to developers). Well-known venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has formed a $100 million fund in cooperation with Apple to encourage development of applications for the iPhone.

Bob Iannucci, Chief Technology Officer, Nokia, said that “we’re just getting started” in the mobile revolution, citing the history of PCs, minicomputers, and other major innovations. He said that each started with a fractionated environment (many versions of PC designs and operating systems), moved to a de facto or real standard (the IBM PC and Windows), then to many vendors adopting that standard, then to the value proposition being driven by software (e.g., the Office suite and databases), and finally to the market being driven by services (professional services and Web services). He said that the mobile environment was still at the start of this process. There is no time for a standards group to evolve a dominant platform, he said, so that a de facto standard—if any—would have to evolve.

There was wide agreement among other speakers at the conference that a de facto standard would not evolve, partly because of those other areas where single companies gained too much power. Most participants said that application and phone developers would have to live with a fractionated environment. Some speakers said that one way to address this diverse environment was to develop core software that could be ported to multiple platforms by open-source developers; this model would help create versions for specific countries as well as a variety of platforms.

Even the core networks in the US are fractionated compared to the rest of the world. Some participants expressed concern that this would limit the deployment of high-speed (3G, “third-generation”) data networks. Seamless transition between WiFi and wider-area data networks may make some of these issues less important as the availability of WiFi in homes and businesses grows.

The message perhaps for developers of speech applications is that it is best to have minimal dependence on the specific platform. Full independence can be accomplished by pure network applications using the voice channel (with some delivery of information by SMS or other always-there options). When some software on the device is used, minimal dependence probably means a small client application with the more complex software in the network.

Control of applications and phones by mobile service providers

Part of the reason for the fractionated environment is that mobile operators control to a large extent which phones will be sold with their service and what features they will allow on that phone (including the “deck” of pre-installed applications).Venture capitalists on a panel at the show said that they wouldn’t fund a company that expected to work through the service providers to get their application deployed; the consensus was that service providers move too quickly—if at all—to accept new applications.

Paul Brigner, executive director of Internet and technology policy at Verizon, was the sole representative of service providers speaking. He noted that Verizon’s recent announcement that it would open its network addressed these control issues. He notedthat developers need only adhere to a specification and undergo about a four-week testing process. Noting by a show of hands that no one in the audience had been to the recent Verizon developers’ conference, he opined that perhaps the company should repeat the conference in Silicon Valley.

A mobile phone is more than a phone

With audio players, GPS devices, and even motion sensors in mobile phones, they become multi-purpose devices. (One speaker even discussed a virtual ping-pong match between two mobile phones.) This makes the device different than PCs or pure mobile phones, in that it is sensitive to the context of its environment and what the owner is doing. Iannucci of Nokia discussed how mobile phones could be used to predict traffic congestion much better and on more roads than current methods.

The device is also usually personal, rather than having multiple users. Thus, an application could learn about the user, providing an opportunity for social networking and other applications. The obvious privacy concerns were cited as a barrier to the use of such information.

A strange prejudice

A disturbing aspect (from my point of view) of both the CTIA conference and The Mobile Future conference was too much focus on visual rather than voice solutions. When questioned about the general disregard of voice input as an option in most panel discussions, some panelists in both conferences cited the fact that the technology wasn’t ready or that consumers don’t accept it, apparently unaware of services such as free directory assistance embraced by consumers or indirect endorsements by companies such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, AT&T, and Google. The bias seems to spring from companies wanting to extend what has worked on the Web, despite indications that consumers don’t like that experience on mobile devices. One panelist at The Mobile Future, Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol (which is looking to leverage the open-source movement to enhance mobile messaging solutions), noted in plain language that even the supposed user-interface leader in the field didn’t meet key challenges: “Web browsing on an iPhone sucks.” Speech isn’t the only solution to the limitations of small devices, but it is certainly part of the solution.