Babbel Introduces Voice Recognition - Closes Gap to Rosetta Stone

And Babbel did it again. After taking the lead on mobile devices with the iPhone application attached to its platform Babbel now introduced voice recognition or the missing link that separated the company from Rosetta Stone.

Speech recognition is one of the flagship features of Rosetta Stone and the company put much work (and I guess much money, too) in it. When I started to cover the upcoming, web based competitors of Rosetta Stone like Livemocha, Babbel and busuu to me this was always the feature that separated them from the market leader. Everything else was quite easy to replicate and transfer to the web.

In fact I think the community feature where other members correct your recorded exercise was / is the alternative to this feature. It works basically the same but of course you need to be an active part of the community to receive this correction. So, people who just want to learn on their own, and I think there are many out there, would have to force themselves to mix with the community or learn without correction of their pronunciation. Also, it does not appear as professional as a somehow mysterious software that can recognize if I pronounced the sentence correctly or not in realtime.

When you are using the new tool though you will receive a score from 0-100 where 50 means that you are generally understandable. Babbel is also planning to add the speech recognition to its iPhone application, soon.

Now, of course one had to compare how accurate the new Babbel application actually is compared to the speech recognition of Rosetta Stone but still, if the application is able to give the learner a general feedback it is already very helpful. Does Rosetta Stone have to fear Babbel? I’d say not yet as both companies are targeting the markets from different ends but that does not mean that Rosetta Stone is not taking them serious. Since the success of Livemocha Rosetta Stone has launched Rosetta Stone TOTALe and will soon offer mobile versions of its learning software, too.

Hence adding speech recognition will help Babbel to define themselves as the “real” alternative to Rosetta Stone for the languages they offer and therefore gain some market share from the low end of the group that Rosetta Stone is targeting but it may also attract the premium users of Livemocha and busuu who would like to have a learning tool that works on their iPhone and which offers speech recognition.

The iPhone application reached over 100.000 downloads already after its launch two months ago which essentially means that Babbel has about the same number of paying users as the application either costs 5,99 Euro for a stand alone download or can be downloaded for free when the user has subscribed to the Babbel service.

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