New Angles on Enhanced Voice

“Wouldn’t it be funny if voice ended up being the killer application for broadband?” We’ve all heard this statement, or something like it, at least once in the past few months. But plain old voice — whether TDM- or IP-based — won’t do a lot to help service providers build margins and keep customers. Of course, softswitch and application server vendors have been offering service providers ways to enhance their voice services for some time. But now companies including startup Casabi Inc. and directory assistance/information services provider INFONXX are approaching enhanced voice and multimedia services from entirely different angles.

Casabi (formerly known as 2BeQ), which recently announced it has secured $2.8 million in series A funding led by Mayfield Fund and Vanguard Ventures, has a plan to Web-enable wireless home phones to allow service providers to deliver personalized, enhanced voice and other services over broadband connections.

“In a sense, we’re doing for voice what Openwave did for mobile,” says David Weinstein, Casabi’s co-founder and vice president of marketing and business development, who founded a company bought by Openwave Systems Inc., which offers mobile data and messaging for leading wireless operators worldwide. “But with broadband, we’re in a much richer environment than Openwave ever was in the mobile world.”

The solution includes Casabi software both on the end-user device and within the network. The company is licensing its client software to consumer electronics makers to build into “smart,” broadband-enabled endpoints. Casabi also has network-based software that service providers either can buy and manage themselves or outsource from a Casabi service bureau, which makes the solution more accessible to Tier 2 and smaller independent and competitive service providers. Weinstein declined to provide details on service provider customers the company is working with, but indicated a major announcement is pending on that front.

There are various financial models for the outsourced option, which could include per-seat licensing and revenue sharing. “So we are very creative in how we are setting up these business relationships,” Weinstein says. Casabi also expects to deliver in mid-2006 a “cookie-cutter package” including a set group of services along with marketing support targeted at Tier 2 service providers.

The Casabi solution extends to the handset communications services that traditionally have been tethered to a PC, such as users’ personal address books, says Weinstein, and because that information sits in the network rather than on the endpoint, the files can be of unlimited size.

It also can allow users to view and reply to e-mail or voice mail using an interface on the smart phone or other smart device running the Casabi client.

And service providers can use the Casabi solution to provide users with specialized content — such as local weather, traffic on their route to work, their personal calendar that day — displayed on the screen of the handset.

Service providers could use the screen to reach customers with billing, emergency preparedness or promotional information. Weinstein adds that these content services are of great interest to cable companies, who could do things like offering pay-per-view previews on the handset.

The first iteration of the Casabi-enabled handsets will not include video, but Weinstein expects video-enabled 802.11 handsets to be available from Casabi partners starting in 2007.

Weinstein continues that the most exciting application of the Casabi solution is its ability to extend peer-to-peer functionality to the telephone handset. That will allow subscribers to use their phones to look at a buddy list and see who’s available, initiate peer-to-peer calls, and receive and respond — via voice or text — to IMs. “Today you have to go to the PC for this, but the PC is not friendly for voice conversations, because you like to walk around when you talk,” says Weinstein.

Of course, these personalized services potentially could help service providers drive new revenue, but Weinstein says that initially the ILECs likely will offer these services for free because their goal is to keep customers from churning to the cablecos “because if they lose you, the odds of getting you back will be very low.”

Casabi is working with several handset providers to get them to standardize on this and expects devices by the first two manufacturers to be available by the second quarter. Weinstein notes that while the requirement to buy a new phone or other smart device to get these services may seem like a gating factor, the cordless phone market in the United States sees annual sales of 50 million devices, so the equipment churn rate is already very high.

Personalization is also central to the strategy of directory assistance company INFONXX, which is promoting automation and what it calls “adaptive interaction.” Clayton LiaBraaten, senior vice president of strategic relationships at INFONXX, explains that “automation for us means the ability to add additional products and services to the DA (directory assistance) call flow and target that to a specific customer or customer segment. It’s personalization, or what we call adaptive interaction.”

For example, the first time users call directory assistance, INFONXX finds out what language they speak, so they don’t need to ask next time they call. INFONXX also can work with service providers to decide which callers should be routed directly to live agents, as opposed to automated attendants. As for content, INFONXX can populate the three to five seconds between a directory assistance or information services caller request and the connection time for that call with audio information such as movie theater or cableco or telco pay-per-view advertisements (if the call was a request to get a movie listing, for example). They also could present that information on the LCD screen of a mobile or other phone.

“What we know about caller behavior is interesting,” LiaBraaten says. “We know their number, what they call for. We know time of day, month, geography and what people are calling for. So we can share that with carriers to optimize 411 and other services for the customer.” Today, he adds, INFONXX is pushing online textual content to handsets, but LiaBraaten says the company is doing multimedia content in a lab environment with an eye toward taking such services commercial.

“411 is not considered to be as sexy as broadband and other applications out there,” he adds. “But 411 works on every device out there. 411 is ubiquitous.”