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Informed Speculation: Voxeo and Text

Here's some informed speculation about the future direction of Voxeo in the area of text.

I wrote about Voxeo's purchase of VoiceObjects in my previous blog post. I've taken another look at their announcement, and Voxeo makes a point of mentioning that "VoiceObjects goes beyond just support of leading VoiceXML platforms by also enabling unified communications via voice, video, text [including SMS] and the web."

Actually, VoiceObjects goes even further. Their tool can develop a single application that operates either in text mode or in voice mode. Their SMS integration is also very interesting. When I'm running on Prophecy I can send SMS messages from CCXML or VoiceXML through an HTTP-based API call to an outside service, but receiving an SMS message is an entirely different kettle of fish. I've had clients ask for outbound SMS services; none so far has been quite up to speed with inbound messages. I want to provide both, and without contortions.

When I was in Australia, if I wanted to manage my account I would send an SMS message to my provider. In response, my phone would enter a dynamic text-driven series of menus. I've never seen anything similar in the US.

So my wish list would be:

  • Outbound and inbound SMS, IM, and email.
  • A method to use my voice grammars to parse inbound text from SMS, IM, email, and other routes.
  • Some way to interact dynamically with mobile phones in a text context.

Will Voxeo provide any the items on my wish list? Voxeo's purchase of VoiceObjects means Voxeo has tools that can support what I want — a possible indicator of future platform capabilities. Voxeo's long-standing public support of the W3's Multimodal Interaction Working Group ("multimodal" is another name for the "unified communications" mentioned in the press announcement) also reveals Voxeo's long-term interest in adding new, non-speech capabilities. I therefore speculate that Voxeo will move into text interactions: Voxeo will find a way to expand its commercial VoIP gateway and its platform to include two-way SMS and two-way instant messages, and Voxeo will also "recognize" text using grammars. And I wonder about two-way email.

As to when this will happen: VoiceObjects is a big bite to chew, and what I've outlined is a lot of work, so who knows? I'll give it until the end of 2009 to get at least one item from my wish list; if it's not ready by then, I'll eat crow and issue a retraction.