AT&T Labs says its Watson speech recognition technologies have been around for more than 20 years, and come this June, it will put APIs and SDKs in the hands of developers who want to give users a way to interact with smartphones, TVs and other devices using their voices.

Despite spending upwards of $350,000 on a speech analytics system, Melbourne based insurance broker iSelect is looking to expand its existing call centre software to support better real-time processing, including possible emotion recognition.

Melbourne-based speech recognition software company, Inference Communications, is looking to ramp up its expansion into the US thanks to a supply deal with VoIP giant BroadSoft.

Hoping to leapfrog over Google and Apple's successes in the smartphone market, Microsoft plans to use cloud-based speech recognition and natural language processing technology to offer user interface capabilities not found on the iPhone or Android devices.

Nambour General Hospital in Queensland has cut average report turnaround times by 28 hours and reduced the time needed to create radiology reports by 85 per cent thanks to the deployment of speech recognition software.