SymbianOne: Rich, thanks for finding time to talk to SymbianOne. Voice recognition is clearly becoming an important technology in the mobile market place, how is the business looking to VoiceSignal?

Rich: Voice recognition as a technology has really started to take off, and as a company we are on a roll. We expect to ship 20 million units this year and our volume and royalty revenue has seen close to a six-fold increase this year alone. Next year we expect to achieve at least a four-fold increase. We are profitable and our customer base now covers the big three, Samsung, Motorola, and Nokia. We have multi year deals with Samsung and Motorola and are looking to expand our relationship with Nokia from Series 60 to its ISA GSM platform. We also have numerous smaller, but no less important, companies like Panasonic and Sendo using our technology in their Series 60 handsets. We are also working with other open operating systems and in the area of consumer electronics, such as MP3 players.

SymbianOne: What is happening in terms of the technology?

Rich: Our core product is VSuite 1.3, which provides name and digit dialing along with application shortcuts, basically what you see on the Sendo X, Panasonic X700 or Nokia 7610. Then we have VSuite 2.0, which is shipping now and has been implemented in the Samsung A700. VSuite 1.3 works around specific prompted commands, so you will get prompted for "name" and you say the name and then you are prompted for "which number" and so on. With 2.0 you can say a grammatical sentence "Call Richard's Mobile" and VSuite will identify the parts of the command and dial your mobile number. We have implementations in several languages, so even if the verb and noun sequence is different VSuite will recognize the request to make a call.

What we are finding interesting is that this technology has got the operators excited because it can allow users to easily access services. Voice commands allow the menu to be flattened, taking a user to a point in the menu with a single utterance. Our technology can not only access phone functions like "open messaging" or "go to tools" it can also go to embedded links, taking the user to operator services. We were talking with a major US operator recently and they have hundreds of portals but the usage is really low. Research shows that one of the key reasons for this is that it takes many clicks to access these service and estimates are that the operator loses 15% of the users with every click. So after say 10 clicks you don't have many users left who actually access the service. Now if they have the ability to say, "go to ring tones" or "go to stock quotes" they don't even have to touch the phone and they are at the service. That is getting operators really excited and it something we can do in both VSuite 1.3 and 2.0.

SymbianOne: So where is the technology going next?

Rich: Well the next step is dictation and we plan to introduce this technology with one of our big clients early next year. The technology provides users with the ability to dictate using an unconstrained vocabulary. For example, you will be able to "Send text to Richard" using VSuite 2.0, which will seamlessly address the message with the person's mobile phone number, and then with VoiceSignal's next generation dictation technology (known as VoiceMode) users can say "Hi Richard comma sorry I missed your call period I'll call you later period". We are using the prototype here at VoiceSignal and have seen a huge jump in our SMS traffic. And obviously it's useful not only in SMS but email or any text based application on a mobile device, even a browser. So, theoretically you could use a voice command to say "Go To Boston Weather" to activate a browser search.

Other areas we are looking at are using voice with consumer electronics devices. As an example, a modern MP3 player can hold thousands of titles; with VSuite the owner would simply name the song they want to play rather than scrolling through endless lists of titles.

So, we see a huge future for VSuite and dictation technology both in smartphone and the wider consumer electronics market. 20 million units is just scratching the surface.

SymbianOne: Given the market size, how important to VoiceSignal is your Symbian based business?

Rich: We are excited about our Symbian partnership as Symbian clearly has the lead in the smartphone market and people are starting to recognize the significance of Symbian OS as the leading smartphone platform. We certainly think there is a mutual win-win opportunity between what Symbian is doing and our technology. Although the volumes in the Symbian space are only a part of our business there are a couple of things that make it very important to us.

Firstly I believe Symbian is on the cutting edge of smartphone development. It has a great operating system with superb capabilities particularly in multimedia, which lend themselves to voice recognition applications. I know the notion of convergence is a bit trite now but it is clear to me that the features of a broad range of consumer devices will converge into the smartphone. Symbian is at the juncture of this convergence. Symbian platforms will make the end user's life a lot easier in managing that mix of functions on a mobile device.

The other reason Symbian is important is that unlike our embedded business, Symbian offers us the opportunity to engage in other business models. So not just per unit but also consumer downloads or hybrids where we deliver VSuite say on an MMC card with a device. This is much more feasible with Symbian than other proprietary systems and it offers the potential for higher per unit revenues, which is appealing.

SymbianOne: Any plans at the moment to make VSuite available as a consumer application?

Rich: We are certainly technically able to do it, but there are several business issues we need to work through to ensure we can support the market and optimize our success. It's simply a case of identifying the right time.

SymbianOne: Another area to address is Developer Tools, an open API, as many developers will surely want to add Voice capability to their applications. Any plans in that area?

Rich: Yes. We now have a VP of market development, Jack Armstrong, who is looking at precisely that capability and how we should go about providing a public API. In that same space we have been working with Symbian to look at specifying Voice APIs for Symbian OS. We recognize the value that could be provided to any third party application from being able to voice enable it and we are seriously exploring how we can provide that capability. However at this stage we have no formal announcements to make, but there will definitely be APIs available at some time in the future.

You can find out more about VoiceSignal's technology from its web site: www.voicesignal.com