Considering the future of Voice Messaging and Voice Mail
A fair amount of our recent activity within our partnership with Alcatel-Lucent has been around the social-media enabled voice messaging solution – its4u ; featured in detail here at the main Anana website. This application has already received a lot of independant press; in SpeechTek Magazine and on TMCnet publication “Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine” and always receives a warm acknowledgement from people that call my phone and hear it for the first time. Often the best responses come from ‘strangers’ who are unfamiliar with what we do here at Anana who are ‘bowled away and surprised’ by the new user experience. I have a great collection of ‘surprise’ recordings in my voice messages; one day I should collate them and glue them all together as an ‘inspiration clip’!
The more that we have played with ‘innovation’ in the voice user interface and experience for voice messaging and voice-mail the more we have realized that the main excitement around the its4u interface is the fact that it is simply ‘different’. Not only is it cool because it sounds completely different, but it is accompanied by a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that brings voicemail alive for the mailbox owner! The multimedia integration of messaging, with message-store, and email, mp3 attachments of recordings, and the ability to retrieve voice messages with a GUI, as well as a Telephony User Interface (TUI) and having it embedded within email brings it all together. I’m not arguing that the giants in this industry don’t have these capacities in their Tier1 voice-messaging solutions portfolio. For some reason they have found it hard to get their clients (the Carriers) to embrace change and innovation in the interface. Perhaps with its4u that changes the mindset a little. We’ve certainly had lots of support from our partners at Alcatel-Lucent with our voice-messaging idea’s.
What do you think? Is it the GUI that changes the game? Is it the change in the voice user experience as a caller dialing in to someone and hitting the its4u service? Try it yourself and see what you think! Leave me a comment on this blog letting us know what you think?
Phone +44 1454 258069 to hear it in action. After you’v called it please have a look at the pictures below; which show the experience the mailbox owner receives at the other end of your message deposit!
If you cannot phone the demo-line then please click here for an audio clip – its4u social media enabled voice messaging
Leave your comments! We are really keen to hear and see your feedback. Better still, phone it, try it, and leave a message!
Systems Components;
- Anana Speech and Web Services Application Framework
- Genesys Telecommunications Labs Voice Platform (Genesys Voice Platform 8.1), VoiceXML2.1
- Alcatel-Lucent Converged Messaging System (CMS) and Messaging Applications Broker (MAB)
- Nuance Speech Recognition System, ASR (MRCP)
- Ivona Text to Speech (TTS) (MRCP)
- and a fair bit of innovation, mash-up and discovery!
In the meantime we continue to explore the “Applications Enablement” and “High Leverage Network” activities and partnership with Alcatel-Lucent and Genesys Labs (Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise). This mash-up is nice because it crosses all these paradigms in one go!
