Over the course of the next few days, we’ll be publishing a series of articles with 2012 predictions by our own Red Clay Interactive staff. First up is Greg and his predictions.
Google Speech Recognition gets big and better
Siri has been a big hit for Apple – being able to casually speak to your phone instead of navigating a series of icons is the stuff of Star Trek. Google has had a head start with this technology, but it’s just not heavily marketed. Google Voice can transcribe your voicemail to email/text (and with interesting results for some dialects), Android has had speech-to-text options, and even Chrome now allows you to search Google by speaking to it via a microphone.
Prediction: 2012 will be the year the “Google Speech API” debuts. It will be marketed against Siri and integrated heavily into Android, and we’ll also see the start of spoken searches via Chrome and Firefox.
Amazon Kindle & Prime Subscriptions
If you don’t own Amazon stock, be sure to buy some after the first quarter. With Amazon activating nearly 1 million Kindle devices a week for most of December 2011, you can be sure Amazon will reap the rewards of ongoing sales. How you ask?
The Kindle e-book reader will help ensure strong sales of e-books, and the Kindle Fire – while also an e-reader – is meant to be a lightweight competitor to the iPad. Coupling the Kindle Fire with Amazon Prime, their streaming music and movie service (that just happens to give free two-day shipping to any purchase on Amazon) and you have a huge additional revenue stream.
Prediction: Amazon will post big profits for 2012. Prime subscriptions will be way up. The Kindle Fire, while not on the same level with the iPad, will land in the hands of people who have a modest budget and continue to pave the way for tablet computing.
Browsers
All three of the major browsers: IE, Firefox and Chrome, still have considerable market share each. Most casual home users will continue to use IE and get their updates with Windows, while the more tech-savvy will split between Chrome and Firefox.
Prediction: The browser battles will level out and settle down, albeit all three will lose some market share to mobile and tablet browsing. Google Chrome hits #25 version release. Firefox hits #21 version release. IE hits #10.
Greg, in addition to Siri and Google, Microsoft also has voice recognition software built into or easily added to MSSQL and .net systems. Many of the voice activated phone tree systems are based on Microsoft technology. We may see this year as the beginning of the battle of this technology as hardware has reached the speeds and capacity now to handle speech recognition.
This I think will play into a change in the winds for website optimization and design patterns. People speak differently than they type. They use different words and more colloquialisms when speaking. As users become more comfortable and technology adapts they will use more and more relaxed speech patterns and vocabulary. At the very least it will cement the importance of proper navigation and menu structure using text and not graphics as I see navigation control as the logical evolution from searching and info updates.
It seems we may have the same players as in the past driving this technology, but a company agile enough could position themselves as a player or at least be an early adopter of the technology. You mentioned Amazon due to its products, but Amazon also has a pretty large R&D machine going on behind the scenes and may surprise us with a leap frog move in voice recognition technology.