A new company called Informio was established today, created with the goal of voice-enabling enterprise applications, either hosted at its data center or at the enterprise, and providing wireless carriers access to these applications, which can be marketed to end users as an enhanced service.
The company recently secured $42 million in first-round financing to aid in this effort. Central to its mission is a focus on voice recognition, text-to-speech and touch-tone dialing technologies. Voice applications can be used on any phone, but the company believes wireless phone users will be predominant.
“We believe the market has more to do with who will derive value from this, and that will be the mobile-phone users,” said Don Picard, Informio chief technology officer. “A lot of the wireless Web things you see these days mostly are about (Wireless Application Protocol) and visual display of information. That’s also stuff that’s useful and integrates well with what we’re doing. But you don’t have to have a WAP phone to use our service. We’re compatible with every phone out there. It doesn’t even need to be a digital phone, it can be analog.”
Here’s the plan. Informio wants to partner with carriers, which will market the system to their subscribers as an enhanced service. For this, carriers will pay Informio a per-user fee and a share of the airtime revenue. All the carrier needs to do is route the calls through the Informio data center and conduct some billing integration work.
The calls from subscribers go to what Informio calls its Unified Media Browser. It’s similar to how an Internet user connects to an Internet Service Provider to gain access to the Internet. Informio users call a local number to gain access to the company’s Unified Media Browser, which the company plans to install throughout the public network.
It is deploying this infrastructure using an open, distributed architecture using routers from Cisco Systems Inc., T1 interfaces to the Internet and application servers, database servers and message stores hosted by Exodus Communications Inc.
The Unified Media Browser is based on Voice Extensible Markup Language and Wireless Markup Language, as well as text-to-speech and voice recognition technologies from Lernout & Hauspie and Nuance. It interacts with the voice-enabled application, whether it is hosted at the data center or at the enterprise, allowing the user to interact with it. Enterprise customers partner with Informio to make certain applications available for voice or touch-tone interaction.
“In some cases, companies will want to administer these applications themselves,” said Picard. “But we don’t think they’ll want to build their own access network to access these applications … When you dial into our network, you open up a browser. And just like you access Web applications through your computer browser, you can access these voice applications through our browser.”
The enterprise will pay Informio a per-user and per-minute fee for this service.
Several carriers such as Powertel Inc. and Triton PCS Inc., an affiliate of AT&T Wireless Services Inc., are testing the system now, the company said, and it expects commercial service to launch in September.
