Most analysts and industry insiders agree the future of the paging industry lies in providing value-added services to the current paging subscriber base.
For some that means upgrading from numeric to alphanumeric. For others, that means adding information services to alphanumeric. For San Diego, Calif.-based NDC Voice Corp., it means adding voice messaging to text messaging, rather than in place of it.
NDC Voice-a joint venture of Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. in Belgium and National Dispatch Center Inc. of California-has created the VoiceOver platform, a voice paging solution designed to store and send compressed voice messages across existing FLEX and other digital networks to a pager manufactured by Oi Electronics, called the 3N1.
“What we’re going to provide for carriers is the ability to create a new vision for their business,” said Kathleen Layton, the new president and chief executive officer of NDC Voice. “By adding voice, they will be able to expand their own attractiveness to new market segments.”
A carrier may either buy or contract for NDC Voice’s terminal and 3N1 pagers to offer a combination alphanumeric/voice paging service to subscribers.
Callers wishing to page a VoiceOver user dial the pager’s number and opt to leave a numeric, alphanumeric or voice message. If a voice message is left, it is stored in NDC’s Voice Terminal and compressed and coded to look like an alphanumeric message to the network. That compressed message is transmitted over the carrier’s network to the pager, which stores and decompresses it. The subscriber then can play the voice message, which, said NDC, sounds just like the voice of the person leaving the message.
The pager can store and play up to 99, 20-second voice messages of up to 10 minutes in length total. Messages longer than 20-seconds can be retrieved as voice mail. The device likely will retail for about $150.
“I think we’re creating an environment where you can really converge voice and data,” Layton said. “We’re not taking away alpha and numeric, we’re just adding voice to it.”
According to Layton, NDC Voice was formed to leverage the strengths of its two parent companies. Belgium’s L&H is a speech products company specializing in speech-to-text technology, of which Microsoft Corp. recently bought an 8-percent share. National Dispatch Center is an alphanumeric dispatch company with several wireless messaging functions.
NDC Voice formed in 1995 and spent the last three years perfecting the compression technology to ensure its quality could meet the demands of the desired product. Now, according to Layton, the company is prepared to bring its product to market.
Darryl Sterling, wireless messaging analyst at the Yankee Group, said he believes that NDC Voice has a solid marketing plan and interesting product. “It’s a very good alternative concept for a product that could actually change the standard for paging,” he said. Adding voice to alphanumeric pagers, “is a combination that could greatly improve the value of the product to the consumer.”
Voice paging carriers operating today, such as Paging Network Inc. and Conxus Communications Inc., said they have found that targeting non-paging users has the greatest marketing success. Alphanumeric customers are not willing to give up text messaging in favor of voice, they said.
Layton said with VoiceOver, carriers can use voice as a value-added service, rather than a replacement service, and pick up the alphanumeric market.
“Voice technology is the most natural human interface,” Layton said. As such, some may wonder what the point is of combining text and voice if voice is the preferred choice. Layton said the answer is that users can continue to receive business-related text messages and forwarded e-mail or faxes to the pager, while more personal messages can be sent via voice.
Also, information services are expected to be the primary growth driver for paging in the future. Even customers primarily interested in voice messaging likely will find value in a text screen that can deliver these information services to the pager, Sterling said, something services using Motorola’s Tenor voice pager cannot deliver as it has no screen.
According to Layton, the primary thrust of the VoiceOver technology is to provide the advantages of voice messaging without the stress of building a new network.
“What we propose to carriers is that they can deploy this by buying our pagers and contracting for the terminals … getting the product to market and working together to meet the customers’ needs … We work on existing networks, so you don’t have to deploy an InFLEXion network.”
Sterling agrees that the solution’s low cost and ability to work with any digital wireless network are both advantages that allow carriers to focus on building a ReFLEX network without worrying about losing out in the voice race for not building an InFLEXion network. “It buys them time in the voice-game,” he said, but all of this is conceptual. “It could make InFLEXion not the voice messaging infrastructure of choice. In concept it does anyway, but I don’t know about in reality … There’s a huge X factor involved.”
In fact, there are several. One is that the technology only now is undergoing tests with carriers, five in the United States, two in Canada and one in Mexico. As a dedicated voice network, InFLEXion could prove more effective than VoiceOver.
Another issue is capacity. Because the size of the compressed voice message is bigger than a traditional alphanumeric message, capacity could prove an issue with some carriers. But Sterling said he believes the platform is designed to shine on a ReFLEX network most.
“The capacity of a ReFLEX network will be improved so much that the size of data sent over the network will not be that much of an issue,” he said.
