AT&T Bets on Innovation

But, WHERE will they get the data FROM ?    AT&T Bets that an Ecosystem Will Innovate and help to create an app that allows deaf people to use smartphones, entrepreneur Kunal Batra needed software that could turn speech into text. There was no way his startup, General Machines, would want to develop such complicated software from scratch.

So Batra tested Google Voice and Twilio but eventually decided that AT&T's speech-to-text program Watson—refined and improved over decades at the telecommunication company's research labs—performed the best. His phone app, Deaftel, now operates by accessing the software on AT&T servers free of charge, although Barta expects he'll eventually pay about a penny a minute.

Batra's decision counts as a small victory for AT&T, which is aggressively seeking outside help in managing what it calls "one of the largest, fastest" waves of technological change ever: the rise of the mobile Internet.

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