Google, Baidu and the race for an edge in the global speech recognition market

Daniel Faggella is founder of TechEmergence, a news and advice website for entrepreneurs and investors interested in the intersection of technology and the mind. Speech recognition technology has been around for more than half a decade, though the early uses of speech recognition -- like voice dialing or desktop dictation -- certainly don't seem as sexy as today's burgeoning virtual agents or smart home devices. If you've been following the speech recognition technology market for any length of time, you know that a slew of significant players emerged on the scene about six years ago, including Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft (in a brief search, I counted 26 U.S.-based companies developing speech recognition technology). Since that time, the biggest tech trend setters in the world have been picking up speed and setting new benchmarks in a growing field, with Google recently providing open access to its new enterprise-level speech recognition API. While Google certainly seems to have the current edge in the market after substantial investments in machine learning systems over the past couple of years, the tech giant may yet have a potential Achilles' heel in owning an important segment of the global market -- lack of access to China.