In a fascinating workshop challenging much of the received wisdom on voice telephony, industry analysts and professional visionaires, Dean Bubley and Martin Geddes, used a supermarket sandwich to illustrate the comparison between retailing and telcos.
Both are established, venerable industries offering perishable, well-packaged, good quality products at a relatively high price and without any room for personalization. In the telco world at least, this has begun to change – and the growth of OTTs and shift to IP for voice show no sign of slowing down. Where the worry in telephony in the past was on over-supply of voice, it is now focused on lack of demand, as both the absolute number of phone calls and the total minutes continue to decline.
And we are already at a stage where voice in apps, in particular in general consumer applications, is established, as vendors and products such as APIs, WebRTC and cloud telephony create new markets. After years of stagnation, the shift to a richer IP-based environment and web real-time communications is now universally acknowledged. It seems that the phone call, a technology product some 120 years old, may be reaching the end of the line.
What comes next? For Martin, it is clear that the future will be demand-driven and personalised, with each individual consumer deciding exactly what service or product suits the mood of the moment: “There is no one size fits all solution; the fundamental shift is towards hyperpersonalization, and keeping a supply-centric view is death. Understand the true needs of the customer or perish.”
Echoing his fellow presenter, Dean urged us to reprogramme our brains to accept that the future must and will be very different. Ubiquity is dead, interoperability is dead, and this doesn’t have to be a disaster. Even as the technologies and industries converge at a macro level, fragmentation is emerging locally through smart phones, broadband and internet. Telephony and SMS will remain, but only as the most basic common denominator.
The arguments for fragmentation and hyperpersonalization are based on the multiple communication needs of any one person at any one time. A phone call may last from a few seconds to hours, may be casual or portentous, may be instigated for any number of reasons – and quality of service may not always be either critical or the decisive element in choosing a provider.
“Future value is not in the transport of minutes, of voice from Person A to Person B, but in what that person does with the information, how they talk, the context. The metadata – that is where the value is,” said Dean.
The shift to new, demand-driven service models places the consumer once more in the central position, moving power to the edge of the network. In the case of voice, this means to voice as a product embedded in web calls or apps, a feature of another service or application such as a game or social media tool, an e-reader or video.
The workshop heralded a new paradigm for voice. Historically, the two-way audio channel for two voices has its value in an ephemeral moment – much like a sandwich. Hypervoice is all about using voice as a source of information, as a raw material with value drawn from its context and extending well beyond the moment. The evolution of the web from hypertext to hypermessaging to hypervoice will see voice-related objects with their own URL. Hypervoice is the next incarnation of the social web, where text and images are joined by voice.
The New Opportunities in Voice and Messaging workshop was run by Dean Bubley, Director at Disruptive Analysis, UK and Martin Geddes from Martin Geddes Consulting, UK.
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