With 2011 rapidly coming to a close, it is time to rank and rehash the achievements in tech for the year that was. It’s hard to imagine that just 365 days ago no one new what Siri was, had every heard of Lulzsec or Anonymous, Google+ was not yet in existence, and Steve Jobs was still with us.
Here at Plum Voice, we have also had a banner year with a plethora of noteworthy developments and achievements, that fit in to the larger framework of the biggest tech stories of 2011. There have been major developments in the field of interactive voice response, and this new technology has allowed us to develop new products and streamline the products and services we already offer.
In February 2011 Plum released Floodlight, the first multi-modal survey product that allows users to design, build, and deploy one survey both telephonically and online. Floodlight is unique because the tool allows users to author one survey and deploy it via any medium they choose, immediately.
Users need not go through a complex process of writing multiple surveys to be deployed on multiple mediums. With Floodlight’s unique interface, they can simply log in to the survey interface, build their survey utilizing myriad question types, and then roll their survey into deployment with the click of one button.
The Floodlight product works telephonically with speech recognition, so users can interface with the product by simply speaking, without utilizing DTMF entry. Users can also access survey content via the Internet, increasing potential response rates due in part to the many ways users can choose to take the survey. In addition, Floodlight was built and developed to integrate with Facebook and mobile devices as well.
There have been similarly notable stories in the larger world of telephone technology as a whole. This was the year of Siri, and the new frontier of speech technology introduced on the iPhone 4S. Siri goes beyond the traditional interactive voice response software typically used on IVR platforms processing and storing keywords and speech specific commands. Siri was engineered to process and understand natural speech, so the program itself has comprehension ability far beyond that of any voice recognition software previously on the market.
The telephony tech boom sparked fierce competition within the mobile sphere, with the patent wars between heavy hitters like Apple, Google, HTC, Microsoft, RIM, and Samsung underscoring the intensely cutthroat nature of the mobile industry. New mobile technology was introduced constantly through out 2011, and companies were forced to move at breakneck speeds to patent the technology and release it to the public before their competitor.
