Growing business and disruptive enabler – voice recognition

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Just finished reading “It’s Time to Smash the Remote – Samsung, LG, and others are racing to bring voice control to the TV set” in Bloomberg Business Week (online version).

It is fascinating – the voice recognition technology has been around for quite some time and finally it seems that it’s reaching maturity. First time I ran into it when radiologists in United States started heavily switching from people transcribing their dictated diagnosis to Nuance Dragon software. The trend just caught on to our clients at SIMMS – smaller private diagnostic imaging clinics. They’ve been making the change quite aggressively and Nuance’s Dragon works accurately even with complex medical terms.

No wonder it’s time to get this into consumer products. Apple with Siri in iPhone 4S and now TV manufacturers are racing to deploy it. Voice recognition is the next advancement that will make our lives easier, but more importantly open up new lands for entrepreneurs to build their companies on and make some of them rich.

First of all, Nuance – the leader in voice recognition technology – is to collect some big bucks. It might be too late to get into the game due to complex technology and patents, but there are at least two large opportunities that I see:

  1. Licensing the technology to create new products and apps or apply to existing ones that were too cumbersome to use without voice recognition before
  2. New emerging app markets, like the case with TVs. There are 1,416,338,245  TVs in the world and soon all of them will be connected to the Internet and have voice recognition with Kinect. This means that you can play Angry Birds and post updates on Facebook, as well as do something that you haven’t done before that would require large on-screen real-estate.
It is exciting times and time will show how creative entrepreneurs can make our lives easier and more fun without getting out of our living rooms! Meanwhile, I hope the technology is not coming to elevators any time soon:
  1. It would steal my new job :)
  2. Get some Scots upset 
P.S. I’m wondering if TVs are there to stay at all. I don’t have one.

Hello world!

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"The Cool"

The first image returned by Google for "cool"

After quite some time trying to decide what my blog will be about, I had a break through. The day before yesterday, in an argument my business partner mentioned that I’m always after “the cool” and trying to get there myself and push everyone there. “The cool” – I guess the latest technologies, cool products and startups, thought leaders, disrupting ideas, smart tactics, etc. His comment did not register with me at first, but yesterday it came to me clear. While I was waiting for Eric Ries come online on Sprouter. I ran into the following Q&A by Aaron Patzer:

Q: Other than your blog, how did you attract so many users so quickly at Mint?

A:We gave our initial beta sign ups red-carpet treatment. By the time we were ready to launch, our blog had generated about 20k email addresses of people who said they were interested. Taking them all would have overloaded the system, so we told people that if they wanted “Alpha” access before everyone else, they could put up an “I Want Mint.com” badge on their website or blog. We had about 600 people do this. That meant 600 free advertisements, plus and increase in Google PageRank, plus those 600 people got special treatment and became our biggest advocates. Source: Sprouter

It appeared to me as a very “cool” tactic of building traction before launch and right away I started recalling all the other cool things I ran into in the past. Wouldn’t it be cool to have all these cool things in one blog? So here it is – the first post and MVP of my blog. Let’s see if I will have to pivot ;)

P.S. Don’t mind my English. I suck in languages overall plus English is not my first language.