VentureBeat

As data and web access started shifting to mobile devices, applications emerged and traditional phone calls began a slow decline, all but superseded by texting, mobile apps and the wireless web.

Today, texting and mobile applications have surpassed voice in popularity, arguably because of their dynamic and flexible nature. Sending photos to friends in real-time is a snap, as is using SMS to update our Twitter status. Want to keep track of your expenses from your phone or see how many calories you’ve burned that day? There is, as the ad goes, an app for that.

This burgeoning app market has a limited lifespan, though. Size and device constraints will eventually throw up roadblocks to mobile innovation – meaning it might be time to reevaluate our reliance on keyboards and touch screens.

Voice has primarily sat apart from mobile applications on handsets, being mostly limited to basic phone functionality. Voice calls and the way we use them have remained fairly static since their inception in 1876. The real changes have been in the device, rather than the communication medium itself.

So how can voice communications be relevant in the world of ‘hottest girls’ apps and mobile IM? The answer may lie in the emerging technology area of voice-enabled applications, or ‘Voice Web ’ – a new way of traversing the mobile web using speech.

Applications need a voice

Iterations of Voice Web have been around for a number of years. Voice dialing (telling your phone to call someone) was one of the first to emerge, but technical limitations and advancements in mobile keypads hobbled it.

Now, as mobile device owners demand more user-friendly interfaces, speech-powered applications are seeing a boost in popularity. Last month’s acquisition of Jott by Nuance is a good indicator of this – as is the launch of Google Voice and Google Voice Search; a new Voice Control feature in the iPhone 3GS; and the emergence of startups like Vlingo, Yap!, and Ribbit, which all share a common goal of capitalizing on the power of human speech and the mobile web.

Individually, each of these has something useful or exciting for consumers, but the benefits are limited in terms of scalability. (Look no further than the controversy surrounding Spinvox and its use of outsourced call centers to transcribe voice messages, rather than the technology it claimed was doing so). They’re also hamstrung by the inability to reach the millions of mobile users who do not have a smartphone.

The next logical step would be for something to emerge that tied all voice apps together; a way for the average mobile user to access all of them at once without the hassle of memorizing seven different usernames or figuring out one more user interface.

‘Voice Web’ technology is starting to let users do just that.

Companies (including Ditech Networks) are developing Voice Web services that incorporate an open API, allowing developers to create a unique application marketplace, similar to what we’ve seen with the iPhone. Early apps focus on speech -enabling popular web activities like calendaring, to-do list management and social networking. Long term, though, Voice Web could facilitate just about anything we do on the web today.

Speech-based applications like Google Voice Search and Yap are obvious choices; others might leverage a mobile device’s GPS functionality to create voice-powered mapping/directions apps, or tap into a phone’s mp3 collection to play a song for a friend during a phone call.

Voice call control is another area of interest. Voice dialing, of course, is currently available – but it’s a poor user experience since it’s tied to a specific application or device and fails to offer continuity to the user.

For example, once a call is initiated via voice, the user is forced to regress to keypad entry for subsequent phone interactions – such as call waiting or including a third party. This is essentially a broken user experience.

The latest versions of Voice Web take the logical step of making these actions completely voice-enabled. As our lives become more and more device-centric, pausing to navigate through a series of less-than-intuitive steps in order to switch between calls (and often dropping one) seems ridiculous.

If a voice dialing function were integrated with all of our other voice applications, telling our phone who to call could become second nature. ‘Fun’ applications may come and go, but essential call control tasks and the need to simplify how we use them will remain.

Most of the companies driving voice-enabled mobile applications come from the application and development communities. The one group in the mobile ecosystem that, to date, has been relatively quiet is mobile service providers.

This is unfortunate, as the service providers own a very important piece of the voice web puzzle – the network. If the providers enable voice web applications from the network as opposed to the device, Voice Web can be made available to any device on their network, not just the smartphones.

Also, a network-based service would mean developers wouldn’t have to adapt their applications to accommodate numerous devices. So a Voice Web application would work on both an iPhone and the free, basic phones operators provide with a subscription. Offering this could also help mobile carriers steal back customer loyalty that currently resides with the device manufacturers.

Voice Web could potentially hold the key to a complete transformation of the telephone call. By putting callers audibly in touch with web apps and services, the mobile web would no longer be subject to the limitations of tiny keyboards with big thumbs – and traditional phone calls could be enriched with true Web 2.0 functionality.

Michael Lambert is Senior Director of Marketing for Ditech Networks.

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Tags: co:ditech-networks, mobile, smartphones