"Why should any business wait for someone to get on their PC to do e-commerce when everyone has access to a phone? There are more than a billion telephones worldwide. This is going to fundamentally change the telephone and how we use it." --Steve Ehrlich, vice president of marketing, Nuance Communications Inc.
Say the word, and you could get road directions, restaurant information, stock quotes or more. And there's no need to ask a gas station attendant or invest in new electronics to get such information.
More than half a dozen voice-portal companies have sprung up in recent months offering subscribers free access to voice-enabled content such as driving directions, restaurant locations, stock quotes, airline schedules, sports scores, and local weather and traffic conditions.
Companies such as BeVocal Inc. (www.bevocal.com) Tellme Networks Inc. (www.tellme.com), Audiopoint Inc. (www.audiopoint.net), TelSurf Networks Inc. (www.888telsurf.com), Quack.com (www.quack.com), iSpeech Technologies Inc. (www.ispeech.com) and others are currently offering these first-round services to users that sign up at their respective websites. Once registered, a caller simply dials the company's toll-free number from any phone, hard-line or wireless, and begins speaking instructions to a "voice browser" to navigate voice-enabled content offered by enterprises and information services companies.
"There are tremendous market opportunities and benefits to extending the reach of the Internet to anyone with a telephone," says Steve Ehrlich, vice president of marketing at Nuance Communications Inc. (www.nuance.com), which offers voice-enabling tools for voice portal companies and carriers it hopes will bring the telecommunications network into the web. The company's Voyager, a server-based voice browser, can be integrated into a portal or corporate site to allow callers access to voice-enabled information and services. "There are literally more than a billion telephones worldwide, compared to 200-plus million connected PCs and devices. The voice web presents an exponentially greater market opportunity. This is going to fundamentally change the telephone and how we use it."
Voice browsing is at the same stage as the early days of the World Wide Web. Right now, voice portals mostly are offering information services.
"Why should any business wait for someone to get on their PC to do e-commerce when everyone has access to a phone?" Ehrlich says. "There are already a number of v-commerce applications out there, and it's just a matter of time until the voice portals and voice sites link up."
Voice browsing is much like clicking links on a traditional web page to navigate the Internet. In the case of voice browsing, though, the browser is a voice recognition engine that deciphers vocal commands spoken in "natural language" by the user. This is not the same as the wireless web, which uses a small screen on a mobile device such as a phone or personal organizer. Rather, the user is able to navigate vocally to content, much of which has been reformatted from existing web content using a hybrid of extensible markup language (XML) known as voice XML (VXML).
These voice-enabled services are still fairly new, and there are plenty of kinks that need to be worked out, mostly in the execution of the services. But it is a starting point from which voice portal companies expect to establish a significant customer base quickly to drive applications development, grow revenues and potentially spawn lucrative partnerships with carriers that are eyeing the new technology.
Analysts say explosive wireless phone use is one of the driving forces behind this anywhere, anytime voice-browsing race, and, as wireless phone use increases its penetration, consumers will opt for packages with more minutes. Wireless carriers also will likely bundle voice-browsing services to make them affordable and to increase network use.
According to researchers at The Kelsey Group Inc. (www.kelseygroup.com), some 45 million wireless phone users in North America will access voice-enabled portals and websites on a daily basis by 2005. This voice-browsing frenzy to get localized information and, eventually, make purchases is expected to create a $12 billion voice-enabled market.
"The emphasis here is on 'stickiness,'" says Mark Plakias, vice president of The Kelsey Group's voice and wireless commerce continuous advisory service. "Success depends on determining what constitutes sticky speech applications, and how to monetize eardrums the way online portals monetize eyeballs today."
Right now, voice-enabled services focus primarily on information. "When we started [BeVocal] we were looking at what applications people demanded most, and what came back time and time again was location-specific services," says Amol Joshi, BeVocal's co-founder and vice president of marketing. "That's why we built driving directions," which BeVocal offers for California, Michigan and Texas, with nationwide directions scheduled to be online by the end of the summer.
But Joshi says driving directions are only the beginning. "Right now you see a lot of content applications, but the future is commerce. The technology is there, what we need now is pull from the enterprises. There's a big difference between just getting flight information and going through the process of actually booking a ticket. What we need is for those enterprises to be more deeply integrated with the voice-portal companies."
Catering to ISPs, cellular phone carriers, web portals and companies wanting to integrate voice capabilities into existing services, iSpeech Technologies says its services also are designed to allow voice access to standard messaging systems such as e-mail, personal information manager calendars and address book applications.
"The iSpeech system enables our customers to leverage their existing user bases and directly compete with the voice portals," Harpreet Singh, president and CEO of iSpeech says, adding the technology turns "voice accessing capabilities into a commodity that Internet and cellular service providers will offer as a standard part of the package."
Ehrlich agrees that voice portals will not be the only players in the voice space. He predicts that major carriers will soon join the fray to help offset the dropping rates for network minutes.
"They will see an increase in minutes used," he says. "Most carriers are thinking about offering voice portal and other enhanced services. The bottom is falling out of their margins. They need to find a way to provide voice-enhanced services that leverage the information on the Internet. We predict there will be a lot of carrier activities in the voice web in the months to come."
BeVocal's Joshi agrees, and adds that while carriers have the brand and the infrastructure, they lack the applications, which he says is what carriers need most to enter the voice-enabled browsing market. "There's a natural incentive to partner with these wireless carriers," he says, adding that BeVocal is actively pursuing such partnerships.
Companies that currently maintain large call centers may also put the new voice recognition/synthesis technology to use. "I think you're also going to see businesses that are having heavy volume and high operating costs for their call centers start to use this same technology to reduce their costs," Joshi says.
Indeed, VOCI Corp. (www.vocicorp.com) has made significant inroads in the call center market with its Sereno voice recognition solution, which allows callers to interact vocally with its synthesized, self-service customer service solution. VOCI's product, while not designed for voice browsing through a voice portal, uses much of the same voice recognition and synthesis technology to automate customer inquiries and transactions over the telephone.
Similarly, InterVoice-Brite Inc. (www.intervoice-brite.com) provides a full line of voice-enabled call center products that use voice recognition/synthesis to help reduce overhead costs and improve customer relations.
Voice Plus Briefs
Level 3 Communications Inc.'s (www.Level3.com) (3)Voice Exchange is a new service that enables telephone quality voice communication using personal computers and IP phones. The new service enables customers of Level 3's IP voice service providers to place calls with their PCs and with new IP or "smart" phones with the same voice quality as traditional voice services. The service is the industry's first SIP-based IP voice service, according to Level 3. SIP is an open, scalable Internet-based standard that initiates voice, video, interactive games, virtual reality and other communication over IP networks. The announcement of (3)Voice Exchange follows Level 3's launch last year of (3)Voice, a long-distance IP voice service.
FVC.COM (www.fvc.com) now sells Click to Meet for the Enterprise, a two-way video service that gives users point and click access to ad-hoc and scheduled video calls, conferences and data collaboration across many types of networks,including ATM, IP, PSTN, DSL Cable Modem and fixed wireless, through a web-based video communications portal. DaimlerChrysler is the first enterprise to pilot the Click to Meet system. Earlier this year, FVC.COM launched its Click to Meet video systems and services offering for Service Providers, allowing them to deliver high-quality video over the broadband Internet to their enterprise customers. With Click to Meet for the Enterpises, FVC.COM is offering customers a choice of a system or service for an easy, cost effective way to deploy and use managed two-way video communications.
eSynch Corp. (www.esynch.com), a pioneer of integrated video tools and services for streaming media and video-on-demand, has released a new version of its ChoiceCaster all-in-one broadband media player. Version 1.5 adds an advanced media search engine that enables users to look through more than 2 million quality streaming and downloadable audio and video files, making ChoiceCaster the only media player able to search and play streaming media content of all types and formats within the same graphical interface. ChoiceCaster 1.5 also includes the ability to import playlists from selected media players; intelligent interactive windows management; a programmable media guide that resizes automatically to channel partners programming needs; improved media guide navigation and support for Real Player 8. The new update became available from www.choicecaster.com and other leading download sites on Sept. 11.
Internet-enabled voice mail services provider eVoice Inc. (www.evoice.com) has struck a strategic agreement to give RealNetworks Inc.'s (www.realnetworks.com) online media player one-click access to home and small business voice mail. With the addition of the eVoice add-in, users can now check their voice mail from within the RealPlayer, making consumers' entertainment and personal communications accessible from a central location. Consumers can add an eVoice button to their RealPlayer by clicking "Check for update" in the Help menu of their RealPlayer. By clicking the eVoice icon on the RealPlayer, users are transported directly to the eVoice website, where they can either sign up for the service or check messages if they are already a subscriber. RealPlayer users will now have direct access to eVoice's home and small business voice mail, while eVoice subscribers now have the convenience of retrieving and listening to their voice mail messages directly via RealPlayer. RealPlayer content was played by 27.1 million U.S. home users during the month of July, two and a half times the number of any other streaming media player format, according to Nielsen/NetRatings (www.nielsen-netratings.com).
