I first used the term “Recombinant Telephony” a couple of years ago to describe how well-defined API’s and standards are making it possible for developers to build and market new, rich phone apps from fundamental call processing, voice processing, and business processing resources. It’s been exciting to see a new set of developers, definitely not “Bell heads”, building mashups using Web-based tools and RESTful architectures that treat voice and telephony functions as just another set of objects in a palette or library of reusable code, scrips or media files.

In answer to the question “to what end?”, the answers are coming fast-and-furious. As the community of developers grows, the set of solutions that they are bringing to market is starting to feel logarithmic. The inevitable incorporation or resources “in the cloud” accelerates deployment of high-profile applications even further. Case in point is the introduction of Ribbit for Salesforce. Hot on the heels of the introduction of Ribbit Mobile (noted below), Ribbit showcased the application described in this promotional video below:



Salespeople who spend hours on the road tracking down leads and closing sales have long been regarded as a ready-made market segment for mobile applications that streamline such processes as expense reporting and updates to CRM files. The first “speech-rec-for-road-warriors” use case I had seen was nearly ten years ago when the Voice Group at SAP demoed a speech-enabled way for travelling executives to fill-out their expense forms over the telephone. Time reporting was quick to follow. Both promised to streamline form-filling and increase accuracy. Still, even though it’s a video promo, the mashup of Ribbit’s phone functions and transcription services with Salesforce’s customer record management functions is more complete and suggests several other ways that existing databases, message stores, contact lists, customer metadata can be incorporated into solutions that make mobile users more productive and generally pleased (if not “delighted!).

Incorporating these existing objects into new solutions is the definition of “Recombinant Telephony.” Even though it is early days for the concept, the results are quite gratifying.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Recombinant Telephony, Cloud-based telephony, Ribbit