SpeechTEK West is coming up at the end of the month, January 30 - February 1, the week after the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference. The SpeechTEK crowd has always fascinated me. Companies bring the many approaches to voice and speech recognition, language recognition, voice dialing, interactive voice response, signal enhancement and other technical challenges. Users are sharing their experiences too: medicine, retail, travel, manufacturing and logistics, finance, and telecom.

What I don't know, and hope to learn, is how aware SpeechTEK speakers and exhibitors of Conversation 3.0, VoIP, and Skype.  As Skype and its cousins become mainstream and ubiquitous, we'll want softphone and embedded telephony as integrated as POTS. There is no technical reason why every Skype user shouldn't be able to easily and quickly design and implement voice menus for callers. What is the platforming strategy that will draw thousands of programmers to voice power their web 2.0 apps? Who is bringing voice tools to content and application creation? Can the softphone makers bring speech technologies to the people, making them as social as bulletin boards, blogs, chat rooms, and podcasts?

Like the VON conference, most of the participants seem mired in 1985-1995 telco thinking, following incumbent money. I'm glad there are whole tracks to define and refine XML semantics and achieve some measure of interoperability. But I want  gory evisceration on this bleeding edge, not a scraped knees.