The Apple Inc. iPhone was expected to cause a shift in the industry on services, and its visual voicemail component may very well be initiating new ways for consumers to retrieve and review their audio messages.
In recent weeks, applications developer Acision announced its own visual voicemail product, to handsets other than the iPhone. Meanwhile, SpinVox Ltd., a company that provides a voicemail-to-text-message application, announced it scored carrier deals with Alltel Corp. in the United States and Rogers Wireless in Canada.
Both companies acknowledged the influence of the iPhone in igniting a new market trend in how customers receive their voicemails.
“There’s no question about it, the iPhone has changed the game,” said Oswin Eleonora, senior VP of sales and marketing for Acision North America.
The iPhone’s visual voicemail service allows users to scroll through a list of voicemails on the phone’s screen, and users can choose which messages to listen to and which to delete. The process streamlines the message retrieval process so that a subscriber doesn’t need to call in and follow voice prompts from an automated system. The iPhone interface also allows users to pause or skip around within a voicemail message.
The service was one of many iPhone features touted as unique when the device was introduced.
Renewed carrier interest
The technology to provide voicemail information to wireless phone users without requiring them to call into a main system has been available for years, Eleonora said-but prior to the release of the iPhone, most carriers weren’t particularly interested.
Once visual voicemail was marketed as a differentiator for the iPhone, he added, “that made the rest of the market say, ‘We’re going to have to take a look at this capability again.'”
Eleonora said that while providing an alternative to traditional voicemail access “isn’t rocket science,” neither are most user-friendly applications.
“It’s about simplifying something that probably we were overcomplicating previously.” Eleonora added that, from the perspective of a company providing value-added services, the introduction of visual voicemail isn’t only about the service itself, but “is about opening up a basic framework from the device back to the value-added services environment that we provide,” he said.
Speak to text
A slightly different take on voicemail alternatives comes from SpinVox. As company co-founder and VP of marketing, strategy and development Daniel Doulton describes it, SpinVox’s voice-to-text service strives to solve several problems related to traditional voicemail: the time lapse between when a message comes in and being able to call in to check it, as well as the problem of needing to quickly write down information from the message and perhaps not having a way to conveniently do that.
When a caller leaves a voice message for a SpinVox user (or “speaks a text message,” as Doulton calls it), the voice message is converted into a text message or e-mail that is sent to the user’s wireless device. Doulton said that the company has a 97% accuracy rate-and that the system also indicates when it doesn’t recognize a word for certain, rather than trying to substitute something that could distort the meaning of the message. The company also has a team of live representatives who can assist in the conversion of a message from audio to text, he said. He said that carriers have recognized that the service can change users’ behavior.
“Very simply, what you find is that people who have the SpinVox service respond faster and more efficiently, and have no problem using voice messaging as one of their main means of staying in touch,” he said.
SpinVox first launched its service in the United Kingdom, and subsequently gained 140,000 subscribers, Doulton said. Besides the recent deals with Alltel and Rogers, the company’s service was launched by Cincinnati Bell earlier this year. And SpinVox also has an agreement with Skype for voice-to-screen messaging in English, Spanish, French and German.
The company’s product also can convert audio messages into blog posts-and Doulton said that major Internet brands are very interested in tying voice into their offering as another way of ensuring that users stay connected with online communities.
A company called Simulscribe offers a similar voicemail-to-text service as a free download, and the company also has a visual voicemail product. It announced in June that it had expanded the reach of its visual voicemail service to the Blackberry Pearl, Curve and 8800 series devices as well as devices running Windows Mobile, and said that it would roll out its “SimulSays” product on additional mobile platforms in the coming months.
The company sponsored a customer survey that found its text-to-voicemail product had helped lawyers and heavy voicemail users save an average of three hours per month because they were able to read their messages instead of calling in to retrieve them.
And even more alternatives to audio voicemail may be ahead. Acision’s Eleonora said that that his company also has a video voicemail product, which for now is only in use overseas in countries which have robust video-calling services.
