Part 1 in a series of short articles reflecting on last week’s eComm Conference. I’m going to kick off with some background on three presentations from the first day which were all about voice services: one targeted at business customers, one targeted at anyone looking to make cheap international calls, and one aiming to integrate voice calls directly in to websites for both business and social scenarios.
IfByPhone: Irv Shapiro, of IfByPhone, described how their hosted “Voice of the Web” infrastructure, could be used to rapidly add value to any “traditional” web site. His target customer is any business that seeks to drive some form of interaction with a potential customer. As he says: “millions of websites have nothing that fits in to a shopping cart” – instead, they seek to create interest leading to some form of interaction, and in particular, a phone call.
The IfByPhone set of services enables a “typical” web developer to stitch voice functionality in to their site, causing a button click to trigger a call to the user browsing the site, connecting them to a member of staff, or some self-service IVR functionality that collects some information from the potential customer, or more.
I think IfByPhone’s key insight is this: in many cases, people might often like to leave their information, but they
- don’t want to type it all in
- don’t want to speak to a human
- don’t want to navigate endless IVR options (Press ’1″ if you called about our special offer)
IfByPhone can address all three issues. You can create a button on a website that will call the customer right now, record their answers to some pre-canned questions, and then hangup. The customer gets their request passed to the business without negotiating with a real human, they didn’t have to type anything, and the call was free and convenient. I think IfByPhone is on to something – it’s a little bit of a hard sell right now, as people aren’t really used to the whole concept, but no less a person than Thomas Howe – the Voice Mashup Maestro – says “Irv’s company … looks to me like the phone mashup service provider that’s closest to getting it”.
MobiVox: Nitzan Shaer, Mobivox COO went in to some great detail about VoxGirl – the MobileVox virtual operator who connects callers to their friends and family when they use the MobiVox service. If you haven’t seen MobiVox before, the service is simple to grasp: you call a local number, say the name of the person to whom you wish to speak, and MobiVox connects you. It uses IP in the middle to ensure the call is delivered at a very low end to end cost, and offers the convenience of just being able to call and say the name, and be connected.
When you call, VoxGirl answers and connects you. Much of the talk covered how Mobivox has “tuned” Voxgirl to behave well in a variety of difficult conditions for recognising speech, including the subtleties of how they analyse noises in the audio stream, assess the probability of something being speech versus background noise, and adjust thresholds to handle the individual nature of the person calling the service. Fascinating stuff for those of us up to our ears in this kind of detail, as we try to polish our voice service to a high shine!
Mobivox are doing something right: they claim 500,000 users in their first four months of operation. They’re the kind of numbers likely to make Jajah, RebTel and others sit up and take notice.
He was cruelly cut off in his talk by the ever-present eGong – the Gong that silenced speakers emphatically once they had gone over their allotted time! I think his final point had been to announce that MobiVox now had an API for developers, available at developer.mobivox.com. Check it out.
PhoneFromHere: And last but not least, Tim Panton gave a very interesting talk about their experiences embedding voice within different websites. As is often the case, what I found most interesting was his candid comments on what had not worked for them in their early attempts at this. For example, they found that people needed a “provocation” or “incentive” to engage using their voice, and simply adding the functionality was far from enough to encourage people to take action. This is a simple, but profound, observation, and one they’ve absorbed and taken into account with how and where they stitch voice in to the sites he covered.
Their service has been used to power sites from Twiddla (an online collaboration space and winner of a SXSW award) and the Tesco Internet Phone, and they have beta widgets for MySpace, Google’s customised homepage, and LinkedIn among others. You can take it for a spin at their site.
