Aculab, a leading provider of enabling technology for the communications market

 

It has been said that the mature voice communications market is experiencing the greatest growth rate since the invention of the telephone, more than a century ago. But this growth, stimulated by VoIP technology, expands the voice application in a completely new domain, where the full convergence of voice, data and now video, including fixed line with mobile devices, creates a range of exciting applications that would have seemed futuristic even a few of years ago. This metamorphosis is happening incredibly fast and is extremely disruptive for the existing business models of voice-based solutions, which have to transform and evolve themselves rapidly to keep themselves in the game. Now, let's have a closer look at how VoIP has changed the long standing rules of voice applications and the associated voice-generated revenues.

 

The impact of VoIP technology on this application type is so tremendous, that it has even affected the application title. Not 'call centres' any more, but 'contact centres' - prompting the full convergence of the communication technologies on the desktop of the new era agents. Voice, complemented by fax, email and instant messaging options, integrated into one solution, not only provides the customers a choice of real-time and offline, 'speak or write' options, but increases the productivity of the agents in parallel with reducing the operations costs. The agents have no need to go to the fax machine to search for a fax, and can update customers with progress information in a very convenient way via SMS.

 

Another major innovation brought by VoIP into the call centre's industry is the ability to create distributed and virtual contact centre types of solutions. In the former type, instead of being placed all on one physical site, the agents are distributed amongst several premises, sited in different geographical locations or even in different countries. In the latter type, there is no requirement to have call centre agents on a site at all, for example, they could be working from home. Both the service owners and the customers benefit from these new contact centre types: the owners get additional operational flexibility and cost reduction, while the customers mainly benefit from the extended service hours. In the virtual contact centre scenario, the agent also benefits from the new technology through receiving better working conditions and greater flexibility while working from home, saving the commuting time and money.

 

This is one of the application types that has gone an extra mile in its VoIP-triggered evolution. Instead of being just a multiparty voice conferencing solution, there are voice and video conferencing services as well, which are often integrated with the data sharing capabilities, to create multifunctional collaboration platforms.

 

Utilising the inherent strength of VoIP to support wide bandwidth voice codecs as well as the narrow band ones, the less than satisfactory sound quality has become a thing of the past. New conferencing platforms are offering superior voice quality and, therefore, an excellent user experience is guaranteed. Moreover, the users are given a choice of the basic, cost-free or premium rate services for the user requiring a feature-rich conferencing environment. As a result, customers are no longer charged 'per minute' and service-based offerings, rather than usage time-based, business models are emerging.

 

The impact of VoIP on voice portals has not been uniform at all. Some of the basic voice services, like the 'speaking clock', which have existed for many decades are still here, operate in the same way and even cost the same. Others, like the automated information directories, have been transformed completely. The 411 service, the 'yellow pages' kind of directory in the USA and its 118 equivalent in the UK and France, is an excellent example of this transformation. Enhanced by the new generation of speech technologies, like text-to-speech (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR), this previously premium rate service became more functional, more interactive, more useful, but free for the end user. Because VoIP technology releases the voice portals from a clear association between the number of callers and the number of the physical circuits required to serve them, traditional call charges are being abandoned. Instead, the 'web 2.0' business model is used to charge the advertisers to receive higher priority for their businesses in the directory listings pushed to the callers, not forgetting the call completion feature of 'press to connect,' which is rightly seen as the 'killer feature' leading to massive revenue generation. Indeed, a long list of benefits is presented by the advanced service to the end users and the facility operators at the same time, leading to exponential growth in the service use.

 

Although the exciting metamorphosis of the application examples discussed above was sparked off by VoIP, it would not be feasible without a set of underlining technologies supporting VoIP as one of the communication methods. The advance in media processing platforms, used as the core technology, made the creation of these sophisticated solutions feasible. From their roots in computer telephony hardware, VoIP-capable media processing platforms exist nowadays in two forms. The first one is media processing cards, which perform voice and video handling algorithms on a set of digital signal processors (DSPs). The alternative is the software-only media processing performed on a standard computer CPU, called host media processing (HMP). Even though the HMP performance is still far behind the DSP-based media processing boards, HMP is a perfect technology for the creation of smaller scale voice systems. Of course, developers of large scale systems, especially those targeting the telco environment, will continue using the DSP-based specialised hardware, especially when required to support the legacy service types, including connectivity to the PSTN telecom environment.

 

No technology has had more impact on voice applications than VoIP, not even the migration from analogue telephony to SONET/SDH or the introduction of the intelligent network (IN) architecture with its SS7 protocol. We have discussed the VoIP influence on some common voice applications, where it gives a boost to the features benefiting both the solution owners and end users. Indeed, with the new 'hormone' in the system, the voice applications market is experiencing an astonishing growth. Are you keeping up with the pace?