More news...Voice is the key
Developments in voice recognition software are bringing electronic assistant products to the fore. Operators are now selling their customers a virtual PA, a character they can speak with to organize their communications
Most VAS software solutions offered to mobile operators come gift-wrapped in the promise that they will enhance customer loyalty, reduce churn, increase minutes of usage and give a much needed shot in the arm to dwindling average revenues per user. Every operator is focused on these goals. Differentiation is key to achieving them-we've all had that drummed into us by conference speakers and consultants alike- and operators are constantly on the hunt for the service offering that will distinguish them from the competition.
Well, some in the industry are putting their faith in a technology that is new to the mobile market; Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR). Like all new offerings, IVR-based services, of which the most familiar is voice activated dialing, are being touted as the solution that could make the crucial distinction in a crowded market place.
In the space of a few years the user's interface to their network could be overwhelmingly voice-oriented, according to those people working with this technology. Richard Brennan, group commercial director at Orange in the UK-which has just launched an interactive, voice-operated product-goes so far as to say that, "in the future people will think it strange that we used to have keypads on our phones."
Speech recognition technology is familiar enough, but it has yet to make a truly notable impact on this industry. Some handset vendors have introduced voice-dialling into their products over the past couple of years, the now-defunct Nortel-Matra stable was one of the first, as was PCC, the handset division of Philips. More recently, the latest wave of Ericsson handsets feature voice dialling capabilities, as does the Nokia 8860 being launched into the US market, and it is believed that the Motorola tri-band GSM unit will boast the function as well.
It's a quirky gimmick but, whilst it may have influenced the odd handset choice here and there, it has not been a successful USP for the operator thus far. This is down to the limits of handset-based offerings. These products generally have storage room for only a small list of names in the voice dialed directory and they are restricted to simple dial-out functionality. They do not offer anything really essential to the user-nothing upon which he/she can be brought to depend-and are therefore of no real value to the operator.
More sophisticated interactive voice solutions are now coming to market and-unusually for the mobile arena-the US has been the first region to begin to exploit them. 'Voice Activated Dialing and its Future Evolution', a Yankee Group report published at the beginning of this year reveals, however, that whilst the region leads the world in this field, there were only 1.5 million subscribers using voice activated services in January of this year.
Slow takeoff is attributed to performance issues surrounding early voice responsive solutions and the group's research indicates that subscribers retain a keen interest in the concept. In the US, a Survey of 400 households carried out by the Yankee Group revealed that voice dialing was the service most participants would like to have that they did not already use at the time of questioning. Voice dialing proved more popular in this respect than both voicemail and contact detail storage facilities.
Voice dialing alone, whilst fine as a handset-based novelty, is not sufficient to justify operator investment in network or server based products. Coming to market now are a range of voice-responsive electronic personal assistants capable of a good deal more than simple voice dialing functions. TMA Associates forecasts that the worldwide market for such products in wireless applications will be a modest $200 million this year, rising to £675 million in 2000 and $2.4 billion in 2001. This outstrips the figures that TMA has for the same product segment in the wired environment, which must be one of the first such examples of impending wireless dominance.
Wildfire, an electronic assistant produced by a company of the same name was launched by Pacific Bell Wireless last December. The beginning of July saw the product's first appearance in Europe, when it was launched by the ever-innovative Orange in the UK. Trials are ongoing with Bouygues Telecom in France as well as an as-yet unnamed Italian operator.
As well as voice dialing, the Wildfire service offers a directory facility that is a good deal larger than most handsets can offer. Users can store 150 names with Wildfire, and up to four numbers for each contact. All of these can be installed verbally, the system's voice recognition technology shouldering the more cumbersome keypad entry-even in the case of handsets fitted with Tegic's T9 predictive text input technology-into second place. For what the company terms 'hostile' environments; very noisy situations, for example, where speech may be difficult for the system to recognise, it has been programmed to respond to keypad strokes as well.
Wildfire also acts as a voicemail service. If the caller is part of the user's contact database, the system recognises the CLI and can greet the caller by name. Should the user receive a second call whilst already involved in a first, Wildfire can "whisper" to the user that they have a call waiting and respond to voice commands accordingly. The system is also capable of call routing to voice command.
Wildfire is a software product and a company, but it is also the name of the character with whom the user interacts. A great deal of time has been spent in the creation of the character. For the UK market a British female voice has been selected-initial trials revealed that the American female voice that the company says met with a warm reception on home soil was not greeted with such enthusiasm in the UK. A French and Italian version have also been developed and Wildfire CEO Dan Hoy indicates that two more language versions are under development and soon to arrive. Which languages, though, he does not specify.
The kind of adjectives that have been used by different people to describe the Wildfire character are a little difficult to take with a straight face. Variously, 'she' is professional, helpful, friendly, fun-loving, caring and trustworthy. Whilst it may be difficult for the uninitiated to understand how a character who really says very little can live up to all these attributes, Orange's Richard Brennan claims that trial users in the UK genuinely warmed to the voice. Programmers built in subtle touches like Wildfire yawning when called in the middle of the night, or giving a smart alec response should the user indicate that they are feeling a little depressed. These sorts of extras, says Brennan, lead users to feel, "almost as if Wildfire is a real person."
Equal care has been taken by General Magic, the Californian creator of another electronic Assistant, dubbed Portico. Portico, which centres on General Magic's own voice recognition technology-MagiTalk-was launched as a commercial trial by Bell South Mobility in May this year. The initial deployment is confined to the city of Atlanta, but the operator intends to extend the service area if the first phase is successful.
Portico has similar functionality to Wildfire, but takes the service a stage or two further. Other forms of communication can be sent to a user's Portico account, including fax and email as well as voice. The system incorporates text to speech capabilities allowing users to dial in and request that faxes or emails be read out by the electronic assistant. Having given the user their email in this fashion, Portico asks if they would like to respond. Should they wish to do so, they give a spoken response which the system records as a .wav sound file which is then emailed back to the original sender as an attachment that they can listen to via their PC. Simply put, a very cool function. Text to speech capabilities will be added to the Wildfire portfolio, according to the company, a little further down the line, with a fax service planned for introduction in the Autumn.
The growth potential in this market is evidenced by the big names moving towards it. The first product out of Motorola's Internet and Connectivity Services Division (ICSD), is Myosphere, a product that functions in a simlar way to Portico. The system, can be accessed from any wireless or wireline phone and, once logged in, the user can access varying types of data with voice commands. Myosphere uses text to speech technology to enable the user to access web-based information. News, weather reports, stock prices-all those things that have become available over SMS can be verbally requested and verbally delivered.
Orange's Wildfire trial involved 2000 customers, journalists and internal participants. the company took customers from various market segments; consumers, corporate users and small business users and found that, not surprisingly the quickest to warm to the service were the technology-literate early adopters. Initial problems with long-winded exchanges bewteen user and service caused some disatisfaction, but Richard Brennan is confident that adjustments have solved these problems. One such is the introduction of a 'barge' function that allows users to interrupt Widlfire at any stage of use. Overall, he says, "we've got a very high satisfaction rate."
Wildfire and Portico differ in one very crucial way. Whereas Wildfire sits within an operator's network, Portico is hosted on General Magic's own network operations centre. Operators such as Bell South that wish to offer Portico to their subscribers do so under a service provision arrangement. General Magic suggests its service model is favourable for operators because it bypasses additional infrastructure investment and enables them to outsource the running of the service.
End users who are keen on Portico do not actually need to go through an operator such as Bell South. Given that the service is run separately from the mobile network, users can simply sign up to it by calling General Magic direct, or via the company's website.
Of course, operators have huge numbers of subscribers that General Magic want to target so it makes sense for both sides to establish partnerships. End users are far more likely to respond to the service if it is offered to them by their existing telephony provider than they are to proactively search it out themselves. General Magic is not forthcoming over the exact details of the kind of agreement it strikes with operators, explaining only that ongoing revenue for the company is linked to the minutes of usage an operator's subscriber spends on the system. Currently, Portico is only available in the US, although a General Magic spokesperson indicates that the company does have mid to long term ambitions in the rest of the world.
Motorola's Myosphere will be directly marketed and provided by network operators. A trial with Vodafone of the UK is in the offing which, given the recent approval of the Vodafone/Airtouch merger, could give the product-if it is deemed successful enough-massive exposure throughout the world.
The Wildfire software sits on 'clusters' of standard Compaq units. These can be supplied by Widlfire, although the operator is free to order them themselves should they wish. The whole system sits in the network, which Wildfire claims gives operators a desirable element of control as well as allowing them to tailor the system exactly to their own needs.
The costs are not easy to generalise. Wildfire charges $6,000 for a software licence, but each licence and cluster will cater only for a limited number of users. There are then support costs, with the company offering system support on a 24/7 basis. Orange has an exclusivity agreement with Widlfire for the UK market that is dependent on the operator meeting certain usage levels; an agreement that, "will certainly not last beyond the end of 2000," says Wildfire CEO Dan Hoy emphatically. Orange is forecasting between 250,000 and 500,000 users within the first six months.
So of what value to an operator's portfolio are such offerings. The fundamental keyword, as always, is differentiation. Initial launches are so recent that there is little as to how the products function in this regard. However, if the proponents of the products are correct, the early starters could benefit greatly from being the first to offer these services.
In the case of products like Wildfire, that are owned and operated by the carrier, customer retention concerns are also addressed. As Dan Hoy points out, if a user has four numbers each for 150 contacts stored on Wildfire, a customers personal database of 600 numbers is effectively owned by the network. This, he says, makes Wildfire a very 'sticky' product.
What is not possible with any of these products at the moment is to summon the assistant without an initial keystroke. The evenutal vision is to have this made a reality. Currently, with a handsfree kit, the in-car user can contact Wildfire and then vocally summon her whenever he/she needs to. Of course, in this scenario, the user is paying for call the whole time Wildfire is idle.
Wildfire is unlikely to be used to this extreme except perhaps by the carelessly wealthy or corporate clients, but the point is that it the product does promise to increase minutes of usage. Customers will be billed for all the time they spend in dialogue with the assistant, much as many operators charge for voicemail retrieval. Obviously charging and marketing strategies will differ from case to case. Bougyes, for example, plans to target Wildfire at the small business and corporate market initially, whereas Orange wants to take the product to all customer segments.
Voice interfaces will be sold heavily on the in-car safety factor. With legislation banning dialling and holding a handset whilst driving becoming more and more popular, a totally hands-free interface could be a real winner. The growing popularity of handsfree kits for everyday usage is indicative of safety awareness amongst mobile users; it is likely that further safety related offerings will be equally appealing.
Mike Hibberd is deputy editor of Mobile Communications International
wirelessgeneva.com
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