Editor’s Notes (May 2000)

The Voice Web and the Telephone VUI

William S. Meisel, Publisher & Editor

The “Voice Web” is a powerful analogy to the “Visual” Web. The term summarizes the potential of using any telephone for functions we now associate with the Internet—including e-commerce. The Voice Web is the confluence of a number of trends:

·      The telephony voice user interface: The most fundamental enabling factor is the maturing of telephone speech recognition (and, to a lesser degree, text-to-speech synthesis). Speech recognition makes Voice Web services possible. It is analogous in importance to the graphical interface of the World Wide Web in the development of the Internet.

·      A drop in telephony costs and changes in billing practices: The cost of a telephone call is dropping and there is a strong trend toward charging a single monthly rate. Eventually, the cost of using the telephone equivalent will be equivalent to the cost of using the Internet.

·      The availability of Internet databases: The Internet has caused companies to create and centralize data that can now be accessed automatically over a telephone. The existing data infrastructures can support telephone applications with minimal incremental investment.

Each of these trends alone will fundamentally affect telephony services and equipment. Together, they have an even more powerful implication. Like the Internet, they will change the way companies and consumers operate.

The term Voice Web should not be understood as simply extending the Internet to conventional telephones—although it certainly does that. For example, viewing the impact of telephone speech recognition as merely making the Internet mobile—extending it to wireless telephones—misses the power it adds to any telephone. Telephone speech recognition provides a benefit whenever the telephone voice user interface is superior to Web browsers. Services that are easier to use over the telephone include getting quick information such as weather; buying something in response to a print or broadcast ad; or managing voice calls. The Web browser interface is a powerful paradigm, but when there are too many pages and complex navigation, it suffers from many of the deficiencies of touch-tone telephone applications.

Telephone voice interactions are fundamentally different than visually-oriented Web browser interactions. Some things are done best by voice and others by a visual interface. The best businesses will understand these differences and take advantage of them, using synergy between the two when possible. “Voice Web” is a good term to summarize a major opportunity, but the analogy to the World Wide Web should not be used to mask the critical differences.

Editor’s Notes (April 2000)

Consumer voice portals

William S. Meisel, Publisher & Editor

Companies are racing to be primary voice portals—the number consumers call first for automated information, services, and purchases. Several companies claimed this month that they were the first national consumer voice portal, including Audiopoint, Tellme, and Quack.com. Others will join the fray over the next few months. Which is first is less important than what will make a primary voice portal successful.

Most consumer voice portals will use a similar set of core features that most consumers will request frequently. These include items such as stock quotes, sports scores, headline news, weather, traffic conditions, horoscopes, and more complex services such as movie times and restaurant choices. Since the information will be similar, the ease of use, speed, and reliability of the access to this information will be a key determinant of choice. These usability factors will differ more than one might expect between services. For example, some services will allow creation of a “personal broadcast” using a Web site or voice interaction, so that a caller can hear a customized report of items of interest, such as local weather and scores of local basketball teams without the requirement of asking for these with each call. Other portals may download frequently requested information to a local site for rapid response or obtain that information from a local database, while others may poll a Web site for each call.

Questionable dialog design can cause frustration. In a recent call to one such site, for example, choices that the system specifically said were available were repeatedly requested, generating the response, “That option is not currently available,” with no confirmation if the system understood the request. This apparent error in design reminds us that voice user interfaces are not always “natural,” and a poor design can cause some of the frustration we often feel with touch-tone automation.

Beyond the core tasks, other differences will affect caller acceptance. A site can get a very loyal user by providing specialized information or a service that is not available on other sites. For example, some sites will provide free short telephone calls during a call to the portal, a convenient feature if one wishes to return to the voice portal after a short call.

The presentation, frequency, and length of ads will affect acceptance on ad-supported sites. Like a radio station that loses its audience when its popularity translates into too many ads, a successful portal may need to limit ads to retain its audience.

It may be that portals will get most of their revenue by “opt-in” commerce—commercial opportunities that the caller elects. These might be ordering pizza, making restaurant reservations, ordering a gift, or asking for delivery of a stock report by email. The consumer might be motivated to check for discounts or special offers in certain categories of current interest. Since the consumer “volunteers” for opt-in commerce, it becomes a service, rather than an intrusion.

Another important aspect of such portals will be availability as popularity grows. Hardware and software must be reliable, so that the systems are available. There must be enough telephone lines so that callers do not get busy signals or wait in queues. Sustaining availability through rapid growth in facilities requires capital investment, so that financial strength comes into play.

Healthy competition should create some interesting dynamics in the months to come. The marketplace will provide us the answers we can only guess today.