New Applications of Voice Technology

In a May edition of the silcon.com newsletter,Tony Lavender, head of Ovum Research, was quoted as saying:"Voice remains a killer app as an add-on or in conjunction with other things.

In the enterprise, this could take the form of services which meld video and voice or web collaboration and voice. In the consumer space, services such as IPTV are looked to as moneymakers."Web2.0 provides a model for this 'melding' of telephony functions to occur, and it is called 'Mashups'. The extensive use of open API's to leverage the network effect of a global community of developers providing new and interesting applications - not considered by the original product developers - is accelerating innovation. This approach has been popularized by mash-ups of google maps, but is a much broader phenomena, with implications for telecom.