Kirusa, a long-time provider of hosted automated voice services has gained a wireless carrier customer as the Ugandan subsidiary of MTN launched a new “Voice SMS” using Kirusa’s platform. For the proverbial “few pennies more”, MTN subscribers in the east African country can dial “star” (*) plus a phone number and record a voice message. The system notifies the recipient through SMS that they have a voice message waiting. They can then retrieve it at their convenience.

Kirusa has shown great staying power, dating back to the days of the multimodal mobile messaging. It is arguably one of the first companies to understand and pursue “recombinant telephony” by assembling services that combine the visual with voice. While SpinVox, PhoneTag, Nuance and others raise the profile of “speech-to-text” rendering (for better or for worse), Kirusa has quietly gone about marrying voice “store-and-retrieve” services with SMS-based text messaging. There is no automated speech recognition associated with Voice SMS.

It is always good news to see a speech/multimodal technology provider gain a wireless carrier as a customer. Kirusa reports that “over 30 carriers, reaching more than 300 million subscribers across the world” have selected its Voice SMS solution. MTN, which trades on the Johannesburg stock exchange reported over 90 million subscribers in 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East at the end of 2008. MTN has dominant market share in Uganda with over 3.2 million subs. It is locked in competitive battle with Zain which reported 1.8 million subs, UTL with 1.65 and new entrant, Warid with over 1 million.

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Tags: mobile services, Recombinant Telephony, VAS, Kirusa, MTN