Thursday, June 21, 2007

Voice 2.0 and IVR

Voice 2.0 is the title of a conference that will take place in Ottawa on November 5 - 6, 2007. The term, Voice 2.0, was first coined late in 2005. To an extent it builds on the notion of Web 2.0, which was coined by Tim O’Reilly.The conference description points to some exciting developments:

Voice 2.0, or New Telephony, has arisen as a result of the convergence of Telecom and the Web. In the process, heavily communications oriented Web 2.0 applications are placing new demands on network infrastructure, and developers of traditionally computing centric products such as video games and business process applications, are discovering whole new opportunities when their products are augmented with human oriented communications ( i.e. voice).

Paul Graham has pointed out that Web 2.0 acknowledges some of the basic principles of the Internet. Democracy is much more powerful and users will not accept being maltreated.

Equally the Voice 2.0 principles should have the same impact on simpler applications such as IVR. The older style IVR systems controlled the user. Now users will insist on retaining control of the conversation, as is possible with modern IVR systems. This will put strong pressures on companies to upgrade to match their competitors.

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