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.

The Ebay rumors are hilarious. Nobody can verify or confirm anything. Not even vague denials from any of the parties. Who benefits from the leak? Skype's VCs pushing valuation buzz and Skype's bizdev team, both to better arm-twist partners.

Everything Skype can offer eBay or its subsidiaries (technology, network access, Skypification of its user experience, PayPal currency conversion of Skype Minutes) can be delivered as a service, without an equity entanglement.

And then you get the Skype Voice announcement. Bill Campbell does a fine job skewering the outrageous charges imposed by Skype. Can you imagine paying 30% of a sale to your credit card company? Or to your phone company for letting you hook up your computer to the phone network? That's Skype's program!

But that's not the worst of that deal. It's that Skype's BizDev team is driving for tactical profit but creating a strategic disadvantage. I'm tempted to say they're trying to think like a mobile service provider but Bill says it looks like simple opportunism.

This deal is an innovation killer.

This type of deal, cherry picking three players out of an entire industry, only reinforces Skype as a "walled garden," a private, tightly controlled place with one master. The other way to do it is to set things up so anyone who wants to compete can do so. Publish protocols and specs and some common tools for call termination (SkypeLite, maybe?) and for commerce. Set rates comparable to what credit card processing companies charge for debit transactions; Skype minutes are risk free since all funds are prepaid cash.

By the way, do you understand what Skype Voice companies do? They are middleware. You call a number. Their computer picks up the phone and answers with a recorded message. It creates a user experience for you using a library of prerecorded messages, a little speech recognition, Voice-XML to guide the conversation, and whatever database of content you're sharing. Like calling up for movie times and making it easy to search for the blockbuster playing near you.

Enormously helpful.

And these companies offer the service now, on regular phone lines, on toll free numbers. They make their money by selling their service to companies that want to engage their customers over the phone. Like banks for bank balances. Or a newspaper for delivery problems. Or a shipper for tracking problems. In none of these examples does money change hands. It's just my business process talking to customers in a convenient, narrow, well structured conversation.

They don't pay the phone company extra for the privilege.

Skype's partnership model doesn't allow this. If there's no revenue, nobody gets paid. And Skype must be paid before they let you pick up when a Skype caller rings you.

Skype's model doesn't allow public service implementations. The volunteers who put together KatrinaHelp would love to implement a service like this but will not charge the dispossessed to find a lost child.

And companies that want to plug in their own IVR systems are shut out too.

Like Bill said, it's a mess.

Instead of putting up a new api, protocols, etc. upon which vendors can innovate and add value the way tellme adds value (terminating calls and doing something with it), they are doing custom deals for a handful of players for short term cash, closing out the developer and entrepreneurial ecosystem including dozens of Tellme rivals.

Skype can fix it but, as it stands, the Skype Voice program is one step back.