With Google providing a VoIP phone service
through its Google Voice (SSN, April 2009, p. 1) and Microsoft's Tellme through its new partnership with
Global Crossing (p. 1), it seems as
if the Web/PC giants are striding full pace into the telephone business. Google
Voice gives you a universal number to ring any or all of your current phone
lines, much like its email service gives one a semi-permanent email address; and
the service is based upon a VoIP telephone service that can complete some calls
directly over the Internet without involving a telephone service provider other
than Google. Tellme’s offering is not a consumer telephone service, but an
Interactive Voice Response system that uses VoIP services to give options to
companies to work around conventional telephone providers; e.g., retail outlets
can have a local number for each city in which they have a store (a number which
transfers to a central, remotely located system), avoiding the expense of a
national toll-free number. To a significant degree, this moves conventional
telephone service providers towards a commodity market, with Google and
Microsoft adding value to make themselves central to an individual's or
company’s telephone service.
And both services use speech recognition as a
value-added feature. Google’s offering is currently voicemail-to-text, while
Tellme offers automated call handling using speech dialog to provide customer
service. Both are using internally developed speech recognition (with Tellme
using the technology of its parent company, Microsoft), so licensing fees will
not add to the cost of the applications.
The strategic implications are enormous. The
initial offerings of Microsoft and Google are fairly narrow, so don't discount
companies such as Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile quite yet. Some telephone
companies are adding options such as voicemail-to-text to their suite of
options. Speech recognition integrated with smartphones can make a standard
service seem more accessible. Uptake of the new services will probably be slow,
and there are likely to be some early-stage problems, although Tellme has long
experience in supporting customer service applications (e.g., for American Airlines, SSN, October 2008,
p. 7). And AT&T has announced
its AT&T Navigator, speech recognition for address and
points of interest voice entry on mobile phones (SSN, August 2008, p. 13)
and “Speech Mashups,” a way for Web and mobile developers to use speech
recognition (SSN, September 2008, p. 1).
The developments suggest an analogy to the Web
and PC browsers, where the infrastructure of the Web itself became largely a
commodity. The power devolved to those who controlled the interface with the
user. And the trend on the Web toward “computing in the cloud” is similar to the
use of services like those of Google and Microsoft that use centralized
resources. History may judge that the Google and Microsoft initiatives are
critical technology inflection points.
