Mobile World Congress: Giving Voice to SMS Messaging

Ubiquitously supported across wireless networks and handsets, texting has become a way of life for millions of young people, and relatively mainstream for everyone else — and unsurprisingly, it’s the most profitable data service for mobile operators. But as carriers have seen their revenue per subscriber decrease, and are looking for new value-added services, they’re looking for new things to do with SMS. The latest concept is the speech-to-text functionality known as voice SMS — and vendors at the upcoming Mobile World Congress will be showcasing such applications in Barcelona next week.

Voice SMS does exactly what it sounds like: A user speaks words into the handset, they’re converted to text by speech-recognition software on either a network platform in the carrier core or a third-party system, and the message is sent via the SMS network to virtually anyone around the globe. A second version lets users speak a message, and a text notification is sent to a recipient telling them to call into a number to pick up the voicemail. In either form, its purveyors hope it will appeal to consumers in its simplicity — and as a way to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome.

“Messaging is absolutely compelling due to its ubiquity,” said Frank Dickson, an analyst at In-Stat. “In developed areas, however, it has become increasingly important for mobile operators to find ways to enhance and personalize the SMS service offering.”

The SMS market is already a global phenomenon. In-Stat found that users send more than 2 trillion mobile messages per day globally. And mobile transaction specialist mBlox reported that it processed 2.5 billion SMS transactions in 2008 — representing growth of 30 percent year-over-year. What’s more, the retail value of that volume translates to approximately $500 million, the company said. No wonder mobile operators point to SMS interoperability and roaming as proof of what can happen when an application lives beyond one carrier’s network.

Christina Domecq, CEO and co-founder of SpinVox, helped pioneer the voice SMS idea back in 2005 with a subscription service that converted incoming voicemail to text, which was then sent to mobile phones as SMS messages or sent as e-mail. Many people find that typing a text is cumbersome, she said, noting that it’s seven times quicker to speak a text than to write one. More efficiency equals more usage.

Is It Voice SMS?

Thus next week in Barcelona SpinVox is launching VoxLinks, a new visual voice mail-like feature. Recipients can click on a “VoxLink” at the end of an SMS message containing converted speech to speak a reply back to the sender. The original sender then receives the spoken text message and is also given the option of clicking on a “Reply” VoxLink — in theory setting up a back-and-forth dialogue.