Voice to Text. To Money.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the (now even faster) emerging space of voice-to-text applications, specifically converting voice mails to text to allow you to 'read' your voice mail.

I am glad to report that I am no longer in the dark on these. After my post, I heard from the folks at SimulScribe who asked me to try their service. I have been using it for the better part of the last month and can say categorically that the technology works. As someone with some appreciation for how difficult this process can be - think noise, fast or soft talkers, poor reception - I am quite patient with the very small percentage of inaccuracies. More importantly, as a business process, it has had a positive impact on my broader 'message management'. Reading and addressing my messages all in one place - my BlackBerry - just makes sense.

Separately, several other strong indicators on the direction of this space evolved over the same period of time:

- while visiting VoiceCon last month, it was evident that UC providers are either already looking at this functionality as a new feature or will be looking at it;

- SpinVox, the PR (if not overall leader) in this space, announced a huge injection of capital;

- Nuance, the giant in speech technologies, announced general availability of this feature set, making it accessible to its large and very diverse set of channels and customers.

Stay tuned for acquisitions. They cannot be that far off.