Google is expanding the reach of Google Voice by activating more accounts. The “soft launch” strategy is a way of letting the marketplace pick winners.
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Verizon Business Announces its “Cloud Based” IVR
Verizon’s introduction of Web Center Voice has potential but will suffer from its marketing position to “complement” a five-year-old service.
Empirix Offers Hammer Testing as a Service
Today, Empirix is formally launching Emprix Testing as a Service(TM), in response to a growing need from companies who are making major investments in a wide range of self-service resources and require highly customized (and dynamic) quality assurance testing that won’t add to the capital budget.
Voxeo Adds Twitter to its Unified Self-Service Mix
Voxeo introduces a new service thatincludes automated handling of both inbound and outbound Twitter traffic as part of Unified Self-Service. It is the product of recently acquired IMified and its platform that enables companies to automate the process of receiving and responding to customer queries via IM.
Vodafone Turkey Offers Customers Voice Biometric-Based Authentication
Vodafone Turkey is introducing caller authentication as part of its customer care strategy. PerSay provides the biometric engine which is baked into the Vodafone Voice Portal Platform by Turkish speech VAR SPEECHOUSE.
Growth Scenarios for Google Voice
Google is poised to broaden the reach of its Google Voice service beyond the original GrandCentral subscriber base. With 1 million phone numbers in reserve with Level 3, it’s time to take stock of Google’s options as a Web-based, virtual voice network operator.
IBM Labs Boosting “The Spoken Web”
This article in the Economist magazine, entitled, “A Web of Sound: Talk About That”, reminded me that the legend of using VoiceXML to speech-enable the World Wide Web is alive, well and targeting the greater good by making Web sites more accessible to the illiterate. The article’s author credits Guruduth Banavar, the director of IBM’s India Research Laboratory, with undertaking a project to make it easier to develop so called “voice sites” which enable callers to navigate the Web and retrieve personal information.
The Message of Voice Biometrics: “Your Identity is Important to Us”
One of the banes of phone-based commerce is the phrase, “Your call is important to us.” It tends to be the last thing an inbound customer hears from an IVR system before being put on interminable hold. It would be much more reassuring – and accurate – for an IVR to say that “Your identity is very important to us” and then, rather than indiscriminately placing each call on hold, to treat each caller according to his or her expressed preferences, status, or other known attributes.
Frogtek offers Smartphone-based Accounting for “Mom & Pops” in Emerging Markets
Thanks to a Tweet from my Alma Mater pointing to this blog post, I’ve learned about an initiative to use smartphones as a transformative tool for small businesses in so-called emerging markets. The article provides some background into the growth of mobile applications for shopping and e-commerce; primarily through the use of text messaging protocols. However, the post’s authors – the co-founders of Frogtek – are more interested in the proliferation of smartphones as platforms for business management applications.
Cast A Vote to Port your Phone Number to Google Voice
You may be able to signal to Google that you’d like them to accelerate the introduction of BYON to Google Voice by casting a vote here. We’ll monitor developments as the service is refined in the coming months.