Voice portals: anytime, anywhere Internet access from telephone

WE CAN connect to Internet through PCs or even through mobile phones with WAP but there are still other devices not connected to Internet like simple wireline telephones.

What is needed today is voice equivalent of the Internet server, a way to give simple telephone user a facility to access rich content of Internet using his voice. An Internet browser provides web access from a computer but not from a telephone. A voice portal is a way to do so.

Voice portals will allow people to call into Internet sites, get information and complete transaction using telephone. In these portals a user can get information by dialling various menu options after listening voice menu on phone. He can also get information by using voice commands or speaking out menu options.

After speaking the voice command, the required information or other option will be played out in voice form from the voice portal. Thus, a user can get the desired information in voice format from the voice portal.

A voice portal service can provide information such as news, weather, traffic, stock quotes, driving direction, restaurants, movies or any other provided by a particular voice portal service.

It can also give useful business information and can support online ordering and other business enquiries and transactions over the phone. Thus, voice portals will provide customer anytime anywhere access to a company's Internet server for information and transactions.

The voice portal solution is possible today due to many significant advances in speech technologies such as speech recognition, continuous speech processing, text to speech conversion and VXML.

The speech recognition technologies are today rapidly advancing. Earlier, speech application could recognise only a small vocabulary but today, due to advance development of these applications, it is possible to recognise a large set of vocabulary with a definite accuracy.

Today's speech system support naturally spoken phrases and do not even require proper training to recognise a particular voice feature.

In a voice portal text to speech conversion (TTS) has a vital role. Once the information is accessed by the portal in the textual form, the challenge of converting it into speech or spoken phrases comes.

It is the output which is to be provided to the end-user listening to the telephone. With the help of TTS it is possible to listen e-mails over the telephone in a sythesised speech.

Today a new type of HTML language has evolved which is called VXML, voice extensible mark-up language. VXML is a major standard effort which provides facility to open up web service to the customer through voice interface.

It will handle synthesised speech for text to speech, recognition of spoken input and recording of spoken input. With VXML, enterprises can build automated voice service using the same technology they use to create web pages.

With these new technologies, voice recognition, text to speech, VXML, voice portals are next evolutionary step in the convergence of telecommunications, computing and the Internet.

The voice based Internet access uses these technologies to give user access to web from telephone. This uses human voice which is the most universal form of communication over an office, home as well as wireless phone.

These types of speech technologies will be able to make significant changes the way people use their phones and the way businessmen view their customer.

This will also add a new dimension to business the v-business, voice enabled e-business. According to research estimates, v- business could reach $450 billion in revenue by 2003.

There can be a number of different types of voice portal solution providers. A new voice portal service provider company can design its own service and features to cater to the need of the market for new services. The most popular kind of provider could be traditional Internet portals, who want to extend his reach through telephone. The existing Internet portals are clearly feeling the requirement of voice enabled version of their portals so that their reach can be increased multifold through telephone.

In the beginning, Internet was designed as an information medium but now it is rapidly growing as a communication medium. Similarly, telephone was designed as a communication medium but now it is becoming an information medium also with the emergence of these voice enabled technologies. There are around 1.3 billion telephones in the world as compared to 250 million computers with Internet access. So it is easy to understand that these voice enabled web access technologies will be useful in the near future.

Voice portals seem to be promising but further advances in speech technologies, cost and convenience to end-users will ultimately decide the fate of these services.

Sanjiv K. Gupta

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Section  : Business
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