MiaMia launches, countdown to certain death may commence
Here’s a new startup likely to implode sooner or later: MiaMia, a service that aims to leverage computational linguistics, natural language processing, speech synthesis & recognition, automatic machine translation, semantic processing, and a wide range of other buzz words in order to provide users with a way to have simple questions answered by SMS or e-mail.
Hong-Kong-based MiaMia (short for “Mobile Intelligent Assistants”) is dubbed the ‘ultimate interface for mobile and internet users’ who want to receive relevant, compact answers to questions posed in their natural language, both spoken or per text message. In November, a new service will be added to the core offer called the MiaMia Email Secretary, which will enable users to dictate emails and email addresses, as well as retrieve emails and listen to emails read to the users.
Most of the answers to the questions that come in will be provided automatically by a host of servers, but fortunately human ‘knowledge assistants’ will be standing by to make sure you get the right response in seconds or minutes.
If this all rings a bell, you’re probably thinking of ChaCha, the dumb mobile answers service which Michael Arrington so loves to hate.
And here’s why it will most probably fail: it’s simply unscalable. Just reading this text on the MiaMia product pages makes me cringe:
That is why MiaMia® has decided to have all incoming spoken questions transcribed, in a few languages (including Chinese), by human transcribers, present in the MiaMia® call centers. Later, maybe in a few years from now, ASR will do the transcription job (based on the former logs in MiaMia® centers of all spoken-transcribed questions) mostly automatic. But for now, humans are still needed to accomplish that part of the job.
Here’s another interesting tidbit: one of the company’s founders is notorious in Belgium and in business circles worldwide. Jo Lernout is his name, and he was one of the founders of the infamous Lernout & Hauspie, a speech-recognition company established in the late eighties, which went public on NASDAQ in 1995, grew to a market cap of $10 billion and was ultimately the subject of a major fraud investigation started by a critical Wall Street Journal article, followed by a high-profile bankruptcy in 2001, an event that my home country is still licking its wounds about. The corporate scandal is often compared to the Enron affair.
Somehow, I think his latest venture holds no great future either.
Robin Wauters is a Belgium-based social media consultant, startup advisor, blogger, entrepreneur, Twitter fanatic, conference organizer and allround web addict. Between trying out just about every new web application that gets in his sight, he advises local startups like ContactOffice, Oxynade and Yuntaa. And when he's not busy trying to keep tabs with what's going on in the virtualization & cloud computing industry as managing editor of Virtualization.com, he's probably working on the organization of Plugg, an annual celebration of European web entrepreneurship.
Nice read, dont forget L&H went bankrupt because of the american & russian (& chinese) government. L&H wanted to make bigger money by investing in off-shore companies and all of them where american (cia), russian (kgb). They took some opportunity to make L & H fail and it worked perfectly as planned. Wouldnt want the little belgians to run away with such technology… You can read about a thousand articles about it. Or you can always ask Jo & Paul if u r up to it. :)
Miamia holds its office in angeles City Philippines. It is run by his unexperienced so-called wife “annie”, together with her entire family and her teacher in grammar. They need some investors to finance there company. There are some reports that they are experiencing financial problems right now. Investors be careful!