Add-on phone services promise rich rewards

By Richard Braddell

WELLINGTON - Smart movers in the telecommunications industry can tap into a goldmine with sophisticated new enhanced services for their customers.

The new services not only offer companies more revenue, as margins on fixed and mobile voice communications and internet access become ever more squeezed. They will also encourage customer loyalty.

Dan Ridsdale, an expert in enhanced network services from the London telecommunications consultancy Ovum, says the rush to take advantage of enhanced and "personal assistance" services has begun. European and United States operators already offer voice-activated services.

Such add-ons will become particularly important in the mobile arena, where voice-activated and text-to-speech services will unify voice, e-mail and fax messaging services into one mailbox.

As a result, mobile users will be able to use voice commands to have e-mails as well as voice messages read out, perhaps while they are driving a car, and then ask the phone either to dial or return e-mail to the sender.

Mr Ridsdale says mobile-phone operators will also set up their own internet services so they can integrate voice activities with the internet.

"One of the great things about having an internet service centre is that you can offer a service that spans the Internet and voice," he says.

"What will happen is that you will get a web page and click on a voice message icon and play that voice message through your PC sound card. Or you can dial a voice-mail number and you can have your e-mails read to you with speech-to-text conversion."

Because such services will require customers to build personalised databases on their telephone company's network, moving to a new carrier will be all the more difficult and operators may choose to provide the services at no cost to ease the way.

The first generation of these services will be particularly suited to mobile networks and Ovum is forecasting uptake in the Asia-Pacific region to explode from virtually nothing now to a $US4 billion-plus market in five years involving 32 per cent of mobile-phone users.

However, voice-activated and speech-recognition services will be also be useful in fixed-wire environments. While large businesses may choose to set up their own facilities in-house, demand will come from small and geographically spread businesses, Mr Ridsdale says.

And while the fixed-wire environment is likely to surrender voice traffic to mobile, it will be harder for mobile operators to dislodge fixed networks in the more advanced "personal assistant" market, which will be more data centric.

"Mobile networks are getting better at data, but fixed networks are going to be faster than mobile networks for a few years to come."