Archive for Voice
by Ewan Spence
August 3, 2008 at 3:11 pm · Filed under Communication, Voice
I’m currently at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, doing a daily podcast, and it’s amazing just how much I rely on my mobile (and in some circumstances not relying on it because no matter the software it’s simply not up to the task). Organising shows to see, interviews to happen, and scheduling work around that, there’s a lot of communication going on between journalists, the media, PR agents, promoters and venue managers. And it all happens on the mobile.
Not the Blackberries, IM or email. Neither does twitter or the various alert services even begin to figure with people. This world runs on Filofaxes and diaries, scraps of papers holding someone’s new mobile number, and a mobile phone…
It’s constantly there! Not on stage or in the audiences – there are enough pre-show warnings to turn off mobile phones – but the whole event has thousands of people no longer in their office, but in a rented bed-sit around the University campus that makes up a lot of the venues. And every one of them is on the phone, constantly. Deals being arranged, bookings to make and change, hustling for more shows, or appearances in showcases, the list goes on.
So no matter the great new technologies that are in mobiles, or the third party services. The only vital ingredient is call quality and signal strength. And that’s a good thing to reflect on in this time of smartphones constantly striving to do one more impossible thing before breakfast. For all that we think the communication potential of our smartphones have changed the world, it’s still only a very small percentage of the global market for mobile phones. I don;t see how the people at the fringe would be convinced to switch away to even using an email or IM system to stay in touch as their primary means (because there are Blackberries out here, but you send a mail, and you get a reply by a phone call – it’s easier).
On the move, lots to do, and the social network of the address book is king. No Facebook here – it’s face to face, or call to arrange the face to face. Simple as that.
Oh and one final thought. Number of iPhones I’ve seen with the high powered agents? None. Number of crappy basic phones that Silicon Valley would turn up their noses, yet have massive battery life and hold calls well? Thousands.
by Debi Jones
February 19, 2008 at 8:12 pm · Filed under ATT, Carriers, Mobile messaging 2.0, News, Rate Plans, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Voice
Hours after Verizon Wireless announced their unlimited calling plan for $99, AT&T responds with a $99 plan of their own. And not to be outdone, T-Mobile USA this afternoon announced a $99 calling plan and then ups the ante by adding unlimited messaging. Sprint, the other of the top four carriers, has yet to release their nationwide unlimited plan. The question is: will they further up the ante and put pressure on these shiny new flat-rate plans?
Verzion’s Offer Details
- $99 - Nationwide Unlimited (voice)
- $119 - Nationwide Select Unlimited (voice, SMS, MMS)
- $139 - Nationwide Premium (voice, SMS, MMS, VZNav, VCAST, email)
- $149 - Nationwide Email and Messaging (voice, SMS, MMS, and data)
- $169 - Nationwide Global Email and Messaging (voice, SMS, MMS, and international data)
- $199 - Family plan with two lines, $99 per additional line
- Subscribers not required to extend their contract to select these new offers.
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AT&T’s Offer Details
- $99 - Nationwide Unlimited (voice)
- $134 - Nationwide Unlimitied with unlimited messaging and Media Net
- New customers can choose month-to-month or 12-24 month contracts
T-Mobile USA’s Offer Details
- $99 Nationwide Unlimited (voice, SMS and MMS)
So Sprint? Last May Sprint began offering an unlimited rate plan bundling nationwide voice, web access, email and messaging for $119. The offer has been limited to markets in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Tampa, Fla., and parts of Northern California and Western Nevada. Today Sprint claims they have no plans for expanding their unlimited plan beyond these markets. The office pool betting opens at COB today. Place your bets on an announcement for tomorrow morning. Anyone?
Winners: Power Users
Losers: Stock Prices Fall for All Four Top US Carriers
Yawners: Non-Power User Mobile Subscribers
Carriers strike quickly to eliminate Verzion’s differinator on price announced this morning, and up the ante each time. Craig Moffett, analyst at Sanford C. Berstein, compares Verzion’s bold move on flat-rate plans to Sprint’s long distance flat rates for landlines in the 1990s, removing confusion from pricing plans, making them easier to compare and hastening a rapid decline in prices. Today’s standard for long-distance is either free or as a feature in a service bundle.
Let the games begin!
by Imran Ali
January 29, 2008 at 11:31 am · Filed under MMS, Mobile messaging 2.0, Photomessaging, Twitter, Voice, Voicemail
Pinger’s been around a little while now, but just rolled out across the UK in recent days. The service enables users to send up to a five-minute voicemail for the price of a local call to other mobile numbers in around twenty countries.
Such a voicemail, or ‘pinger’ is created using IVR voice prompts for usernames, number entry and the message itself; the notion of a completely voice operated mobile messaging service is an appealing one and coupled with the immediacy and asynchronism of a ‘Twitter for voice’, Pinger is theoretically very appealing. It’s probably best explained by the brief How It Works video on the Pinger site.
Between Seesmic, Twitter and now Pinger - video, text and voice now collectively provide the collective capability for micro-blogging and status messaging in most of the formats that people would wnat to use (photos are missing of course and I don’t believe Seesmic is really mobile yet).
I’m not convinced that this type of asynchronous voice messaging is something that text-mad Brits will embrace or indeed whether the ethnographics of Twitter can apply to other media.
I do however find the use of voice UIs as appealing and a strong precedent. Unfortunately, the user experience of Pinger is appalling - three attempts to recognise the five letters of my name failed followed by the IVR’s inability to correctly identify the DTMF tones of the number I was trying to send to!
As such I was unable to test a service which shows promise and highlights what may come to be some emerging trends in user behaviour.
by Imran Ali
December 26, 2007 at 2:04 pm · Filed under Communication, Devices, Events + Conferences, Mobile messaging 2.0, Openmoko, Research, Studies + Research, Twitter, Usage + Usability, Video Conferencing, Voice, iPhone
With the sad cancellation of O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conferences, it seemed that the unique melting pot of traditional telcos, cellcos and bleeding-edge disruptive innovators, hackers and entrepreneurs would dissipate.
Thanks to the efforts of one of the former ETel advisory board members, Lee Dryburgh, the unique conversation between these communities will move beyond telephony into ‘communication’ in all its forms - social media, telephony, ethnographics and - of course - mobility.
Lee is hosting the inaugural Emerging Communications 2008, conference next Spring in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum. The conference wil also be accompanied by an unconference day, providing a mix of traditional conferences with the energy of a parallel BarCamp-style event.
Though the lineup isn’t finalised yet, there are some interesting speakers lined up already, including sessions on Building Twitter from Blaine Cook, Emerging & Usage Patterns from Intel’s Dawn Nafus, OpenMoko’s Michael Shiloh and thought leaders such as Norman Lewis and Sheldon Renan.
One of the underlying implicit themes from the current programme of speakers seems to be the potential in the intersection of telephony and social networks - issues which speak to the future of mobile messaging, a topic covered by MM2.0 contributors just recently.
Though not focussed exclusively on the mobile industry, eComm 2008 promises to surface some interesting directions for messaging and communication. As such it’s a community that we need to watch closely, listening for the weak signals that’ll give clues as to what happens next in the industry…
{ Disclosure: I’m a member of the voluntary eComm 2008 advisory board. }
by Imran Ali
December 10, 2007 at 6:24 pm · Filed under Communication, Messaging, Mobile messaging 2.0, Voice, Voicemail
Last week I was invited to test QTech’s newly launched UK edition of their reQall service, just ahead of today’s launch.
QTech’s Chief Product Officer and co-founder Sunil Vemuri, is a graduate of MIT’s prestigious Media Lab, specialising in the research and development of technologies to augment and enhance memory; what Sunil describes as ‘memory prosthesis’ and ‘personal memory aids’. Now at reQall, Sunil’s still very much focussed on ‘helping people remember better’.
As a veteran of France Telecom R&D’s Boston labs and Apple’s technology group, Sunil’s pedigree is impressive (I had the pleasure of working with him on a handful of digital music projects at Orange. However, with a board populated by user-centered design guru Don Norman, thinker’s thinker Edward de Bono and futurologist Peter Cochrane the company will really have to try hard to blow it!
Fortunately, they didn’t…the service itself is a ‘digital memory’ tool that enables users to…
- Call a free number, record a voice message - a reminder, note, to-do item, idea, thought or diary entry.
- Have the message transcribed into text and archived online.
- Notifications and digests of archived messages can be sent to the user by email, RSS or SMS.
What’s astonishing is the simplicity and accuracy of the user experience. At no time did I need to repeat myself, my transcribed message appeared shortly after my call (I wonder if this is a human process?) and without typos. I couldn’t quite figure out how to record different types of messages - whether I needed to voice-prompt reQall to differentiate between tasks and meetings or if the transcribe process figured it out.
I’ve long argued that voice interfaces are the most overlooked UI paradigm in mobility - it seems that QTech and the reQall guys not only understood this deeply, but were able to execute a simple, elegant user experience.
Now I wonder what magic reQall’s voice engine and Stikkit’s command-line for life could weave…
