Over the past five months, (April to August) there has not been strong activity in terms of publicly announced customer wins in the global speech recognition market. The number of publicly announced speech recognition deals grew from 34 during the first three months of

2006 to reach a total of 69 deals year-to-date for 2006. Network-based speech deals continue to account for the majority of customer wins and revenue, as seen in the technology quadrant of the Industry Dashboard. Since April, there has been an uptick in activity for PC-based speech. It has grown in proportion from 10.5 percent (for the February to March timeframe) to 17.6 percent (for the April to August timeframe) of deals, representing a 7.1 percent upward shift in proportion for PC-based dictation and search solutions. Communications was the hottest vertical over the past five months, accounting for 26.5 percent of deals, followed by the public sector, retail, and health care markets.

Over the next five months, Datamonitor expects stronger activity as customer wins begin ramping up in the third and fourth quarters of 2006. Datamonitor's Industry Dashboard provides three graphical representations that segment various markets within the speech industry as seen in Figure 1.

It is important to note that the information provided in the Industry Dashboard reflects only publicly announced customer wins. Datamonitor provides more detailed and comprehensive studies of the speech recognition market. For more information on Datamonitor's research, please go to www.datamonitor.com or you can e-mail the author at dhong@datamonitor.com.