With a little help from concerned consumer groups and government researchers, voice technologies are forging ahead as a safe alternative to dialing while driving, while at the same time opening new revenue channels for advertisers and wireless carriers.
Voice technologies include portals, which can be reached through a toll-free number or by dialing a dedicated network-based access code, and text-to-speech and speech-recognition software, designed to allow a user to access the Internet, personal information such as schedules and driving directions, and to send and receive e-mail, all without pressing a button.
United Kingdom-based research firm Ovum estimated in its “Personal Assistant Services” report released last October that the global voice portal services market will reach 300 million users by 2005, giving Wireless Application Protocol-enabled phones some stiff competition in the mobile Web access arena.
“I have said that WAP is dead. I think we’re going to look at voice as supporting about 80 percent of the Web-surfing capabilities in the future,” said Clarence Friend, chief executive officer of AirTrac Inc., a developer of voice applications for the wireless Internet.
But Megan Gurley, analyst with The Yankee Group in Boston, thinks WAP won’t fade away, it will just have to share the spotlight with voice technologies as mobile phones-especially those in Europe-get increasingly smaller and issues about safety continue to surface.
“I think that it’s going to be a duel. My thoughts are that whether it’s WAP or some other graphical delivery method, voice will augment that. It’s not at all convenient to enter in the parameters of a search or dictate an e-mail with a phone. Ultimately what you’ll find will be a multimodal combination … of voice in, graphics out, or graphics in, voice out, depending on how a user wants to utilize their service,” Gurley said. “Voice does have issues with background noise and echo.”
WAP mogul Phone.com Inc. acquired @Mobile several months ago specifically to gain access to its voice-portal technology, and carriers such as BellSouth Corp. are hopping on the voice-portal wagon, offering its “Info by Voice” service to both its wireless and wireline customers in Atlanta.
Speech-recognition technology has been around since the 1980s in call centers, stock brokerage firms and other places where the call volume was high and most of the information being exchanged was simple. Its introduction into the wireless space came about a year ago with the advent of third-generation technology and is just beginning to make some substantial headway, said Friend.
“We started because we were in the phone rental business and we wanted to get the minutes of usage up,” Friend said.
According to Adam Zawel, senior analyst with The Yankee Group, no voice technology provider has yet to fully integrate its services with a wireless carrier, but Friend hinted that he was less than three months away from launching with a carrier. Zawel said voice-enabled services will be very important for driving usage, considering the number of people with WAP services is very small in the short-to-medium term.
Safety benefits aside, having a voice portal also will bring added value to the carrier, possibly helping to reduce churn. Friend said carriers are looking at charging an additional $10-$20 per month for voice-driven content and services, although it most likely will be part of a bundled plan, helping to soften the blow to a consumer market already fed up with their phone bills.
“What they (consumers) are tolerant of is being able to choose a voice portal service offer as one of the options with a bundled plan. If they want specific services, they might pay for that on an individual basis. Voice portal services will be judged by the consumer by how good the content is,” said Kathy Frostad, director of telecom product marketing for Nuance Communications Inc., a voice interface software provider.
Another route is to provide the voice-driven content for free and support it with advertising. Frostad thinks that if the carrier can make the advertising relevant to the wants and needs of the subscriber, then it has a good chance of being viewed as a benefit, rather than an annoyance.
“Audio advertising is a huge future opportunity. The carriers are really looking at it. It will not only drive up minutes in the network, but it will allow them to enter other areas of business” such as book sales, CD sales and groceries, said Frostad. “They (carriers) have an opportunity to redefine commerce.”
SpeechWorks International Inc. in Boston recently launched an interactive, permission-based advertising concept called the SpeechSpot. SpeechSpots enable traditional dot-com and online portal businesses to add revenues by including five- to eight-second audible ads on their speech portals.
Voice portals Quack.com, Foodline.com and BellSouth’s Info by Voice all launched service using SpeechWorks technology.
Common language
With so many different companies developing voice-driven content, establishing a common protocol, much like the Internet’s Hypertext Markup Language, became an industry priority.
The agreed-upon standard in the voice market is Voice Extensible Markup Language.
VoiceXML has its roots in an AT&T Bell Laboratories research project called PhoneWeb, and after AT&T Corp. spun off Lucent Technologies Inc., both companies pursued development of independent versions of a phone markup language.
Motorola Inc. eventually joined the game, but wanted to emphasize speech recognition rather than touch tones as an input mechanism. These efforts led to the release of the VoxML protocol in October of 1998, and in March of 1999, AT&T, Lucent and Motorola established the VoiceXML Forum-now with more than 150 members-to combine the three companies’ research and hardware and work toward a common standard.
“VoiceXML is basically a way to take any kind of data that is earmarked for the Internet and be able to provide that information over the phone through a speech interface,” explained Nuance’s Frostad.
Standardizing VoiceXML will simplify the creation of Web-based voice-response services, enable phone and voice access to integrated call center databases, Web sites and company intranets and enable new voice-capable devices, the forum said.
VoiceXML will include features such as touch-tone input, automatic speech recognition support, audio recording, recording play-back, call transfer and conferencing and speech-to-text capabilities.
In March, the forum announced it completed Version 1.0 of the VoiceXML specification, and in May the World Wide Web Consortium agreed to adopt VoiceXML 1.0 as the basis for the development of a W3C dialogue markup language.
Julie Roth, director of marketing for Motorola’s Personal Networks Group, said VoxML, which is widely used among content developers today, will be in compliance with VoiceXML. She said VoxML incorporates more features, but VoiceXML is more simple.
