You have to consider 2 things, competition of like products and competition of different mediums if you will. By different, I mean WAP based, or Win CE based graphic systems which may differ in their attempt to duplicate the desktop experience. Palm was a sort of variation on this theme, but they have now joined the WAP camp even though they have a separate project as well. Symbian is also a player here with their EPOC operating system.
In voice, you have like products from Wildfire, Yahoo, Webly and Motorola. Motorola has combined their voice product with the WAP browser probably making the most powerful competitor. Their voice system Myshpere also uses the same ASR engine from Nuance as does Webley and may have many features similar to GMGC. Mot also owns Starfish which is the PIM component of Portico.
There are others, but this is probably enough.
Also, look at what Nuance is doing and their V-commerce alliance. There is a move also to set a standard called VoxML which is suppose to be a way for web designers to build a voice interface into their web design. This would mean many systems like Portico could easily do Voice interfaces to existing web sites rather than having GM's team make special applications that only work with Portico.
When you do your research, look into scalability and how they can do security. This seems to be the greatest limiting factor once you assume the human interface is acceptable.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
Mark |
