Mobile Messaging 2.0 » TSVP - TÃ©lÃ©phone s’il vous plaÃ®t: a hosted discussion on mobile messaging, devices, and user practices and trends

TSVP - TÃ©lÃ©phone s’il vous plaÃ®t

by Imran Ali

July 30, 2007 at 8:42 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Usage + Usability, Voicemail

Phonevite’s recently launched invitation and announcement service (screencast here) is kinda like a ‘voice Twitter’, enabling users to record voice messages which are then forwarded to a number of recipients who can then RSVP the sender. Phonevite’s not too dissimilar to YackPack, but the ability to RSVP with basic ‘Yes/No’ voice prompts makes for a neat user experience.

This feature got me thinking about voice UIs in general; it’s fair to say that text and voice are the natural UIs for telephony and yet, despite the proliferation of mobile commands lines, we see little development of voice interfaces.

I’m interested in hearing readers thoughts on voice interfaces - are we missing important UI ideas, is voice technology too difficult to develop for or is the user experience simply not suitable for general purpose applications?

I wonder if call center frustrations could be addressed by handsets could download IVR scripts from call centers and enable users to interact locally with a voice application…?

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3 Comments »

Paul Ruppert wrote @ July 30th, 2007 at 11:25 am

You should be watching two companies in particular, Kirusa and Bubblemotion. Both are in the “Voice SMS” field and have been receiving a fair amount of attention. SMS has nothing to do with it, but they’ve both positioned “voice packet” UIs as an SMS susbtitute/replacement. The value proposition is that voice message exchange is essentially an easier UI and doesn’t require literacy. Reflects commercial strategy of both which is first entering the bottom of the pyramid markets in middle and southern Asia, e.g., India, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. Kirusa is financed out of Indian VCs and Bubblemotion by Sequoia. I’m guessing that If they are moving “voice message” clips, then they also might be thinking that it could be a platform play for any type of media message including MP3 music, or video. Both have nothing to do with MMS.
Paul Ruppert at Mobile Point View. Come visit me at http://paulrruppert.typepad.com/blog/

Imran Ali wrote @ July 30th, 2007 at 4:05 pm

Thanks Paul - I’ll keep an eye out for those guys - might be worth inviting them to the ETel 2008 programme

John Nahm wrote @ August 6th, 2007 at 8:52 pm

Hi Imran,

Thanks for your review.

We are planning a mobile version of our service in the near future, and I just heard from one of our users that the service works quite well from his iPhone (gotta try it ourselves). Wouldn’t it be neat if you could one day send multiple real-time voice messages to your friends from your mobile without much clicking (the day is coming).

Watch out also for a new Quick Phonevite widget (almost there) that lets users send a Phonevite, without logging in, from any web site that has the widget.

Cheers,

John

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