Thank you to everyone who came out to hear me speak on the opening day of Ecomm 2008. A couple people have asked me to post my presentation from the Paprika : Voice is a Spice talk, so here I’ve put it here.
The premise of the talk is that voice is a lot like a commodity market that tries to grow by changing the commodity, not the ways it’s used. For instance, I used paprika as my example, and suggested that if a paprika CTO faced the same problems as the telecom market, the response might be to produce paprika soup. (Yes, I picked paprika because the idea of paprika soup is nauseating.) For all the higher value paprika soup has over just plain paprika, no one wants it. I used corn as an example of success, which for all kinds of good and bad reasons, is a commodity that supplies a good percentage of products in the average grocery store, including it’s inclusion as an ingredient (corn flakes), a drink (high fructose corn syrup), a food additive (Coke food coloring and flavoring) and even as what cows now eat in the feedlots (even though cows eventually die because they cannot digest corn well… they simply keep the cows alive long enough using anti-biotics and then kill them.) Corn is a commodity, but is now dominant in our diet not because we eat more corn, but because it’s used in so many ways to make other products better or less expensive. Relating this back to paprika, the proper response isn’t to pretend that paprika is the important part, but to find other recipes that would benefit from it’s rich, red color.
Mashups are a very compelling architecture by which we can add voice into other applications. I gave examples from logistics, health care, financial and IT help desk applications, none of which are voice applications, but all of which can be made better with voice. As a business side effect, all of these applications currently serve problems that enterprises pay for. As businessmen, all we need to do is to convince them that the voice mashup solution is better than the current solutions, and from my research, it currently is.
In the end, we will undergo the same transition as the agricultural market. In the last one hundred years, we have moved from a nation of farmers to a nation of cooks. I see the future of voice as an identical transformation.
The bottom line is this: voice is truly a commodity, and to expand it’s reach in the world, we need to treat it that way. Our attempts to innovate voice through additional features reduces it’s value as a commodity. We need to turn our attention away from voice application innovation, and instead concentrate on making other applications better with voice.
