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May 2009 | Volume 12 / Number 5
The Next Wave Redux

Voice, Presence and Telephony N.0

Despite more than a decade of development, VoIP services today are little different than traditional telephony as practiced for a century. Yes, we’ve decorated the original service with voicemail, email notifications and phonebook auto-dialing, but the fundamental service remains the same. You place a call, you wait to be connected and then you find out if the other person is available and willing to talk.

It’s true that increasingly we find people using IM to check in advance whether the other party is available and, if not, to agree on a better time. This may be integrated, as pioneered by Skype (News - Alert), or independent but, if this is Voice 2.0, it’s only an incremental improvement. One issue is telephony has gone mobile while IM remains tied to the desktop. SMS can provide equivalent coordination, but the mobile user interface keeps the two functions separate. When you need to talk, it’s easier to just attempt the mobile voice call and fall back to voicemail or SMS if the call fails.




Several years ago, a new voice messaging service emerged in Asia that addressed part of what’s needed. It’s called Voice SMS. Like mobile text messaging, Voice SMS is an asynchronous push messaging service, except with voice clips (typically less than 30 seconds). This means the two parties do not have to be available at the same time and it allows people time to think about their next utterance in a dialog. And as a push service, the “conversation” flows much more naturally than it would in an exchange of voicemail messages. In the U.S. and E.U., several asynchronous voice messaging services have launched, for example, Pinger’s voice messaging service or Palringo (News - Alert)’s IM with push-to-talk. In each case, messaging is asynchronous like Asia’s Voice SMS, but the user interface is improving.

The ultimate solution should seamlessly transition between asynchronous voice messaging, push-to-talk and one-on-one live conversation as desired. Recently Rebelvox demonstrated how this might work (although as I write this there is no product or service available). Like Palringo, an instant messaging interface lets you see if your correspondent is available. A push-to-talk button lets you send them an asynchronous voice message. You each can see a history of your messages, voice or text, in an IM format display. But here’s the breakthrough: If you see a message coming in live, and you choose to, a single click lets you listen in catchup mode (silences dropped) and, once you are caught up, seamlessly connects you in a traditional voice telephone call. Now that’s Telephony N.0! IT

Brough Turner is Chief Strategy Officer of Dialogic (News - Alert) (www.dialogic.com)

» Internet Telephony Magazine Table of Contents



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