Mobile Speech Recognition Revenue Growing Thanks to Cloud

In a new report released by ABI Research, the firm states that cloud-based solutions will cause revenue stemming from mobile speech recognition platforms to grow 68-percent by 2017.

Why? Because developers will have access to speech recognition APIs stored in the cloud rather than having to develop services for individual platforms.

In the past, mobile speech recognition has been offered to customers by way of relationships between device manufacturers (Motorola) and platform vendors (Google), or through virtual assistant apps created by platform vendors themselves (Apple's Siri). Both solutions are backed by loads of financial resources dumped into R&D.

But smaller development houses are unable to bring speech recognition to their applications due to their limited resources. Thus, speech recognition has been "trapped" in functionally specific applications, the report states.

That said, the cloud is the gift that keeps on giving for small developers, and will open the door to new possibilities for consumers. "Leveraging the cloud as a delivery mechanism, platform vendors can enable nearly any application developer that wishes to make its user interface experience more efficient,” said mobile devices, content and applications senior practice director Jeff Orr. "ABI Research expects that consumers will first see the benefits of these efforts in mobile banking and retail applications."

ABI Research reports that the efforts of companies such as Nuance, AT&T, and iSpeech for exposing their speech recognition APIs and developer programs is the foremost strategy in reaching the "long tail of mobile applications," or rather, getting more apps other than those provided by Google and Apple to feature mobile speech recognition. Developers can now license these APIs, saving money that would have otherwise been spent on hardware and platform-specific development.

"Reaching a varied group of developers working on different OS and hardware platforms makes cloud based solutions the optimum approach to enabling the masses," says mobile devices, content and applications senior analyst Michael Morgan. "It is the approach of using network based solutions that will drive the rapid increase in cloud based revenues."

The new report forms part of ABI Research’s Mobile Device Enabling Technologies Research Service, which comprehensively analyzes the technology segments affecting growth in the global mobile devices marketplace. To gain access to the new "Speech Recognition in Mobile Devices” report, contact ABI Research here.

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Kevin Parrish is a contributing editor and writer for Tom's Hardware,Tom's Games and Tom's Guide. He's also a graphic artist, CAD operator and network administrator.

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