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.
Amid a mass of hype and hooplah around so-called Unified Communcications (UC), Google has launched a pre-beta program for developers to build new applications around Google Wave.
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A new hosted offering by SpeechCycle (“nRich Grammar Factory”) puts data in the hands of companies to build new grammars, ensuring better recognition rates and higher levels of caller satisfaction with voice self-service. The solution marks a milestone in Recombinant Telephony by moving grammar development into the cloud.
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Today Voxeo is acquiring IMified, a company which operates a hosted platform that provides its clients simplified ways to off automated Instant Messaging services regardless of protocol or proprietary service provider. It’s all part of Voxeo’s efforts to support what it refers to as “Unified Self-Service” as part of a broad suite of Unified Communications services.
Now that we know the price and release date of the Palm Pre, I’d like to pour some fuel on the flames that are illuminating Palm (and Sprint’s) strategy for voicemail and other speech-enabled services.
Microsoft’s go-to-market partners provide the best testimonials regarding the uptake and financial benefits of implementing Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS, for short).
This story by Dean Takahashi in Venture Beat provides vivid evidence of the changing models for call origination among social network participants. According to one report, this is about 12% of the traffic level on Skype these days, but given the much smaller user base, it speaks to the power of linking voice channels to all the increasingly addictive and immersive social networks.
eBay issued a letter to its customers saying that it was removing the Skype-based click-to-chat or click-to-talk buttons from their listings, effective June 10. EBay’s management cites “limited buyer and seller usage”. But it is more likely that the company, which derives significant revenue by taking a percentage of the value of transactions carried out through its resources, had no incentive to encourage interactions, and the subsequent transactions, to be carried out over a synchronous voice or text-chat conversations.
In a move designed to make it easier for network operators to support cloud computing, Cisco launched a new Unified Service Delivery package that includes the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), a data center-optimized version of CRS-1 (its flagship Carrier Routing System) and the Cisco Nexus 7000 data switch. The CRS-1 integrates two 10Gb modules and a 40Gb forwarding processor in order to support service providers’ ability to deliver resource and network intensive video and data services directly fropm from their data centers.
Nuance recently announced that Avaya, Genesys, Intervoice/Convergys, Holly Connects and SwampFox had employees who were among the first graduates of a new technical certification program offered by Nuance Speech University. Certification indicates proficiency in a number of areas designed to give enterprise customers confidence that their vendors or integrators will be putting Nuance technology to best use on their callers’ behalf.