Esat Fusion is adding v-commerce capability to its range of services, with a talking email feature due for rollout to Oceanfree, IOL Free and IOL Gold customers in July.
Red Circle Technologies, who developed the ‘talking email’, launched the technology to corporate customers under the eVoice brand last month.
In offering such a feature along side its current WAP committments, Esat Fusion seems to be hedging its bets on the direction the mobile email market is yet take.
Andrew Conlan-Trant, Esat Fusion’s marketing and products director says that unlike PIN based systems, ‘talking e-mail is hands free and very secure’.
The company claims that talking e-mail will allow users to read, send, forward, delete or reply to email using simple voice commands. It will also offer a context sensitive Help menu.
Messages sent or replied to via talking email will be sent as sound file attachments (.WAV files), which recipients can launch by clicking on in their mail reader.
However, once messages are accessed by computer they will not be accessible via the telephone. The system will also inform of any attachments to the e-mail. A separate Esat Fusion talking e-mail account will be necessary for each e-mail address used.
‘This is Europe’s first speech enabled e-mail system that can be accessed from any mobile or landline phone,’ says Ger Dowling, founder of Red Circle. ‘People on the move are able to listen to and respond to e-mail using ordinary speech, without having access to a laptop, an Internet cafe or engage in text messaging.’
Eugene O’Mara, chief operating officer of Red Circle, says ‘v-commerce makes sense’ because there are 1.5 billion phone users, compared to 150 million Internet users. ‘We are trying to make technology and the Internet accessible to the people,’ he said.
Because Red Circle’s primary focus for its eVoice product has been the ISP user-baser, it is initially only compatible with the POP3 protocol. ‘This will quickly expand to include HTML and IMAP4 email protocols too’, says O’Mara.
Plans are also in the pipeline for a dedicated custom-designed business model, which will allow corporates to access their office voicemail and email capabilities remotely. ‘This enterprise edition should be available in July’, he says.
O’Mara says email’s major constraint is that many people still only have access to it via a home PC at home, as few people have 3G mobile devices.
‘Of the two major ISPs and phone companies in Ireland – BT and Eircom – we struck a deal with BT’s Esat Fusion, whose internet community comprises Oceanfree, IOL free and IOL Gold. This gives eVoice access to up to 50 per cent of the country’s email user base.’
Talking email uses voice recognition and voice verification as fail-safe measures for increased security and reliability, says O’Mara: ‘eVoice’s voice recognition has a first-time recognition of 97 per cent and over, and if it can’t understand the speaker, it will ask them to move to a quieter location.’
Voice verification is established at the start when callers register but also ‘dynamically’ throughout phone calls, he added. ‘The technology is equivalent to that used by the British security services to validate the location of individuals for curfew or parole reasons.’
O’Mara expects there to be at least a two-year delay in the roll-out of 3G devices, but that when it comes there will still be a demand for hands-free audio. ‘Many people will still want a small device they can talk into or listen to – or, as we call it, a SUI/speech user interface.’
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