Service Provider Bottom Line:Carriers that view voice as a monolithic application rather than as a feature in service of countless applications could miss the boat. Read on…
We’ve written about and talked to (podcast) Thomas Howe in the past — he’s doing great work exploring and building voice-enabled enterprise applications.In a story written for VON magazine, he gives a great explanation at what is driving the intersection of telephony and Web development and what it all means (emphasis mine):
There is a simple truth behind voice innovation, and it is that voice is a feature, and except for a relatively small number of very voice-centric situations, it’s not an application. You can take a thousand non-voice applications, like disease management or credit scoring, and enhance them in very interesting ways using voice. The reason why these applications aren’t the primary focus of our industry today is not because adding voice to a human resources application is difficult.
In fact, given today’s mashup architectures, it is very simple and cost-effective to do for organizations of all sizes. The reason is because voice used to be difficult, and so we had to spend decades learning about the technology and large amounts of money to deploy anything, so we simply stopped looking outside of our cubicles.
The logical consequence is that we focus on voice services for the masses because that’s all that was practical, and we really know nothing about the applications that the masses require outside of ringing phones. It works in the other direction, too. Since telephony was difficult, the vertical application developer never stuck his nose into the world of voice, and thus the gulf was created. Like a puppy that’s kept in a cage too long, we run around in circles long after the door’s been opened.
I’ve run into just this situation myself when trying to understand new voice development models and businesses, like Ribbit or new telco-delivered service models.
It’s very easy to get stuck thinking that voice is an application delivered to a handset rather than a feature or capability that could be used to support any number of applications — that is, things you wants to accomplish. In the enterprise, those things are a business process. In the consumer world, it’s some sort of activity — scheduling soccer practice, distributing family photos, getting a Christmas gift lift for your grandkids, etc…Voice is one way to do this — as is IM, email, etc.
When service providers start to think like this, and help developers to code like this — then you’ve really got something.
But voice as an application is a tough mindset to break.
I think the time has come where industry is going to ask for Voice as a feature. Yes there will still be voice applications which will be there independent of Voice enabled applications.