International coalition gets hyper about voice

You’d be forgiven for thinking that voice calling is becoming less important to the telecommunications industry. Figures from corporations and government have shown, in recent years, a decline in those subscribing to home-phone lines. Its apparent replacement, mobile service, is becoming more about accessing the web than making calls. For example, Rogers Communications Inc.’s wireless division saw revenue from data services in the first quarter of 2014 surpass voice revenue for the first time. However, an international coalition is now promoting the idea that advances in technology make it possible to bring voice back to the forefront of telecommunications — where email, texting, instant messaging and social networking seem to have taken over. “Text will only get us so far,” said Kelly Fitzsimmons, co-founder of the Hypervoice Consortium. “It’s leaving behind about two billion people today who are not in their native language or have learning disabilities, like I do. I have dyslexia. So it’s one of my cornerstone passions to be able to provide a web interface and a way for people to be able to communicate with their devices in a way that isn’t based solely on a visual interface.” In a phone interview, Milwaukee-based Fitzsimmons and the other co-founder of the consortium, London-based Martin Geddes, talked about how they first met in 2010 and were on the same wavelength in terms of their thinking on the opportunities for voice. They formed the organization two years later. “We’re driven by passion in that both of us, independently, can see an enormous potential for voice to become more of a first-class member of our digital world rather than a left-behind afterthought,” Geddes said. Corporate members of the group include HarQen Inc., a voice-technology company Fitzsimmons founded and for which she remains a board member. Geddes’ consulting business is also a member, as are Ericsson ADR, Telefonica SA, InterDigital Inc. and Tropo. Geddes and Fitzsimmons envision a world where voice communications share many of the attributes that make email an attractive means of communications, such as warnings about who is trying to contact you and why, the ability to have content stored indefinitely and searchable, and being able to attach related content. “The technology to make voice searchable, shareable, findable — as is text — is available today,” Fitzsimmons said. Despite the impression created by having just a handful of voicemails completely clog a mailbox, Fitzsimmons said it is possible to have a nearly endless amount of phone conversations recorded and stored. “The system is not built the way it needs to be built to accommodate storage like it can today,” she said. Fitzsimmons added that market forces could be holding back progress on this front, since expanding every customer’s voice-storage capacity exponentially would be an expensive endeavour for telecom companies. But if demand creates a business opportunity for such a service, telecoms could reduce costs by partnering with technology companies that specialize in this kind of thing, she said. Legal and cultural issues are also a concern, the consortium founders agreed. For example, consent of at least two participants who are involved in a call is required in many U.S. states for it to be recorded. In Canada, just one party active to a phone call has to give the OK to it being recorded. “There are legal and regulatory issues still to be solved,” Geddes acknowledged. Fitzsimmons said the system she uses for recording phone calls requires her to log in, and then an electronic voice warns all participants that the call is being recorded. Creating a tangible record of voice calls in this way has its benefits, she said. “You have freed up the mental space, the mental chatter that goes from, ‘Oh my God, I have to remember this,’ to ‘No, I don’t have to remember this; the system is remembering it for me.’ I just have to be smart enough to log in before the call.” As for those who just don’t want their phone calls recorded, Fitzsimmons said public resistance to the idea is likely to lessen over time. “What we’ve witnessed in the last 15 to 20 years is increasingly the willingness of people to trade privacy for productivity,” Fitzsimmons said. “We do it all the time. Imagine what we do for couponing and the amount of information that we’re willing to give away so that it’s more convenient, à la Facebook, for us to keep in touch with old friends.” Geddes said the “hypervoice” future “doesn’t have to be all or nothing,” and there is room for some calls to stay unrecorded. Fitzsimmons said voice communications can be made simpler. She foresees people having a greater ability to simply click in and out of conversations, particularly those involving multiple people. “There’s a whole new emergence of, basically, social media for enterprise,” she said. “What that looks like is that there is a continuous activity stream that people can jump in and jump out of, very similar to Facebook. “Let’s say you’re working on a contract and you want to be able to talk with three people and start up a conversation on the fly. You use these systems … where you simply click on the people, their phone rings and they’re simply added to the conversation.” The Hypervoice Consortium’s website includes a “manifesto” that lays out some of features it says should be part of voice calls in the future. This includes information that tells a person why they are being called, such as a subject line or proposed agenda. “Caller ID is no longer sufficient to convey rich context,” it says. The manifesto also says that a “voice conversation system should be able to capture all related digital actions and interactions, and link them into a single activity stream.” The “stream” should include related information, such as notes taken, pictures and customer records to create “one integrated conversation.” It also calls for having conversations recorded and searchable, along with offering an undisputed record “of what was offered or accepted” for calls in which transactions are made. Duncan Stewart, Deloitte Canada’s director of technology, media and telecom research, agreed there is still a big role for voice in telecommunications, with the average number of minutes Canadians spend talking on their cellphones increasing year-to-year. Stewart said opportunities to enhance what’s available in voice services likely exist. However, he said it’s unclear whether there is market demand for the features being promoted by the Hypervoice Consortium. On having calls recorded for future reference, Stewart said he would not likely be interested in such a thing. “A lot of people like chit-chatting with me on the phone because it’s not legally binding,” Stewart said in a phone interview. Stewart said he would want important details in conversations to be documented in an email, even if phone calls were recorded and easily retrievable. “Even if you can make voice searchable, indexable and all that stuff, the voice quality might be low, words might be blurred or misinterpreted,” he said. Jeff Kagan, an independent technology analyst based in Atlanta, also said the demand for such voice features remains uncertain. “I can’t say that there is a market for it, but then again, there was not a market for the iPod when it was first invented, and it changed the music industry,” he said in a phone interview. “And it was the same thing with smartphones.” Rejean Bourgault, Avaya Inc.’s vice-president of large accounts in Canada, said in an email that voice is playing a “key role” in product development at the networking technology company, such as one product that conducts analytics on exchanges between call centres and customers. Bourgault, who also does side work as a futurist, added that voice “will play a critical role in the future combined with artificial intelligence. … My son, 15, asks Siri every morning what the weather will be for the day. For him (as part of the cyber generation), it is 100 per cent normal.” Bourgault said when speaking with Steve Wozniak last year, the Apple co-founder told him that “voice will be a very key interface of the future.” While many of the Hypervoice Consortium’s suggestions seem geared toward business communications, there are elements that can be part of the consumer landscape, Fitzsimmons said. “There will likely be a killer consumer hypervoice app that will become the must-have application for being more productive at home,” she said. For example, Fitzsimmons noted a group of soccer parents might benefit from technology that allows them, in single conversation involving everyone, to determine a meeting spot for an event. Geddes said there are certain moments in life — for example, a baby’s first appearance on Skype — that many people would like to preserve. “The ability to keep that cherished communication and know it is safe and put in an appropriate vault for a long-enough period is a kind-of value-added service upsell that could offer,” he said. The consortium leaders said there is a lot of opportunity for the telecommunications-service industry in the area of hypervoice, though challenges exist and some fundamental changes would be necessary. Fitzsimmons said: “The opportunity really has to do with re-envisioning business models and looking at how central a place they can play in things like identity management, memory management …. and redefining the services they bring.” — With reporting by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

International coalition gets hyper about voice

News | May 23, 2014

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International coalition gets hyper about voice

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