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: