Versioning has finally been introduced to the world of voice communications. Apparently, we've all been mired in Voice 1.0 for years...and at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference, the community has envisioned not only Voice 2.0, but also Voice 3.0:
Jeff Bonforte (who runs Messenger and Voice at Yahoo!), outlined the basics of Yahoo!'s vision for emerging telephony. This begins with the move from Voice 1.0 to Voice 2.0: here, voice moves to software and becomes a platform in which prices are based upon flat fees. This evolution has been happening of late. What's next? Voice 3.0, which takes that platform and transforms it into a medium for network integration, in which pricing is based on per-application or per-transaction use.
Yahoo!'s emerging telephony strategy describes a utopia of rich user experience and content. (And interestingly, one of the benefits listed is increased access to Y! itself. Huh! That being said, even Yahoo! acknowledges that consumers aren't ready for Voice 3.0. Bonforte cited a stat (backable?) that there are more rotary phones than Vonage phones, which says a lot about consumers' death grip on Voice 1.0.
So, where is Yahoo! in this market shift? Yahoo! believes that it will make the leap to 3.0 more comfortably than its competitors. Bonaforte touted these advantages to the eTel audience:
- Yahoo! has existing relationships with consumers
- Yahoo! has a deep inventory of content, developed both by and for consumers
- Yahoo! can apply its deep learnings around its core asset - search - to voice recognition. e.g., Yahoo! search can handle both ten ways to spell a name, and Yahoo! voice will handle the ten ways to pronounce it. This was earned by years spent processing massive amounts of user input.
Given this confidence, it's not surprising to also hear that Yahoo! is "extra" confident that Google won't be able to bring as much to the telephony market. e.g., Google has great search expertise, but smaller communities for mail and messaging relative to Yahoo!. I'm not sure that I buy into this argument, since it's been hard to overestimate Google's rampant entrepreneurship, but the consumer dynamics are worth considering.
Tags: christine herron spacejockeys voip technology yahoo telephony o'reilly etel
