The price of free phone features

I often get the question, “If Android and Qualcomm offer voice activation for free, why would anyone license from Sensory?” While I’m not sure about Android and Qualcomm’s business models, I do know that decisions are based on accuracy, total added cost (royalties plus hardware requirements to run), power consumption, support, and other variables. Sensory seems to be consistently winning the shootouts it enters for embedded voice control. Some approaches that appear lower cost require a lot more memory or MIPS, driving up total cost and power consumption.

It’s interesting to note that companies like Nuance have a similar challenge on the server side where Google and Microsoft “give it away”. Because Google’s engine is so good it creates a high hurdle for Nuance. I’d guess Google’s rapid progress helps Nuance with their licensing of Apple, but may have made it more challenging to license Samsung. Samsung actually licensed Vlingo AND Nuance AND Sensory, then Nuance bought Vlingo.

Why doesn’t Samsung use Google recognition if it’s free? On the server it’s not power consumption effecting decisions, but cost, quality, and in this case CONTROL. On the cost side it could be that Samsung MAKES more money by using Nuance in some sort of ad revenue kickbacks, which I’d guess Google doesn’t allow. This is of course just hypothesizing. I don’t really know, and if I did know I couldn’t say. The control issue is big too as companies like Sensory and Nuance will sell to everyone and in that sense offer platform independence and more control. Working with a Microsoft or Google engine forces an investment in a specific platform implementation, and therefore less flexibility to have a uniform cross platform solution.