Listening to Demand for Voice Command in Virtual

Communities

Dawn Marie Yankeelov

ASPectx

www.aspectx.com

Dawny@aspectx.com

6-21-01

What We Will Cover

• The Landscape in Enterprise VCs• Factors of Mobility• Value Seen in Voice Portals & Vcommerce• Trends Toward Speech Recognition• The Players• Corporate Clients of V-ASPs• VoiceXML • Wrapup: The Future

The Landscape of Enterprise VCs

• Corporate portals have tremendous need for customer relationship management

• Back-end database driven sites proliferate

• Sales Force Automation and Marketing Automation techniques at play

• Realization that multi-communication paths creates loyalty

• Infotainment incredibly important—keeping the fun factor for clients and consumers

CRM “Hot Spots”

Source: The Yankee Group, Wireless CRM, 2000.

“The U.S. mobile and remote-worker population will grow 41% from 39 million in 2000 to 55 million in 2004. Field sales professionals comprise the largest percentage of this remote-worker population.”

CRM Ramping UpEstimate of Corporate Applications Designed for PCs and Internet Devices.

Source: Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Equity Research. IDC, and Yankee Group, 2000 studies.

“Fast ramp” window

Factors of Mobility: Growing Demand For Voice Web

• The telephone will become the ultimate access device to the Internet (Now: 1.5 billion phones and more than 450 million mobile users)

• According to Nomura Research, there will be more mobile phones connected to the Internet than personal computers by 2002

• Microsoft Believes—Announcement of a Phone in Every Computer with Windows XP

Voice Web: Confluence of Trends

• Maturing of Telephone Speech Recognition (and text-to-speech synthesis)

• Drop in telephony costs and changes in billing practices (Internet access=phone)

•Availability of Internet databases; support for telephone applications•Acceptance of over-the-phone and over-the-internet purchasing

Voice Portal

Response is Read Back

User Speaks Command

Speech Recognition

Text-to-Speech/Audio Files/

Concatenated Speech

Browser/Interface

•User’s voice input translated into HTTP request

•Information retrieval translated into an audio output

Information requested is retrieved

Internet

(WWW)

External Databases

A Turn to Voice Portals

– More than 128 million voice portal users by the end of 2005, creating a $12.3 billion industry—Kelsey Group

– Revenues sources will include: advertising, fee-per-call, reselling customer information, and m-commerce.

– M-commerce migrating to V-commerce will represent $520 million by 2005--In-Stat Group.

– Audience largely male: 24 to 44; except for shopping services

Appriss: Began With Victim Notification

• Travel• Flight Information Line

Flight Notification Service• Government• Federal Claims Office

Call2Court• Human Resources• NextJobNow

School Attendance• Logistics• Healthcare Information Service

Customer Service NotificationAutomated Pizza Ordering

 

Support Players

Approximately 55 serious contenders in voice integration and development to date

Significant Investments

• Talk2 received early investment by Hewlett-Packard and later Oracle, now up to $52 million in VC funds

• AT&T announced first investment by a major carrier in May 2000 with $60 million equity investment in TellMe.

• NetByTel, the first company to extend voice commerce technology to Web sites, received $18.1 million in round-two funding from top-tier new and returning investors in May 2001. The round brings NetByTel’s total funding to $25 million.

BeVocal’s Total Voice Portal

• Business Finder—search engine for locating over one million U.S. businesses

• Driving Directions—11 million streets in the U.S.• Flight Information—up-to-the-minute flight information on

international and domestic flights• Traffic Updates—65 largest metro areas• Weather• Sports—up-to-the-minute scores and highlights• Stocks• Infotainment—soap operas, lottery numbers, television dramas

BeVocal and iBasis Expand VoiceXML in Europe

• Application Developers in U.K. first access last month to BeVocal Café tools on the iBasis Global VoIP Network

• Free VoiceXML events and connection back to BeVocal in Sunnyvale,CA where apps are hosted

• Registered developers in 30 countries

Enterprise Players

• Office Depot’s automated audio portal-weather and shopper help from NetByTel– 7 voice modules for CRM since Aug. 2000

• American Airlines’ flight times and flight notifications• Giorgio Armani and Macy’s Audio Tip button on

holiday specials since Feb. 2001• Schwabwelcome.com—tour of investment bank

website via CEO Charles Schwab – Up since Dec. 2000 getting 100,000 calls per day

using voice recognition

OnStar

OnStar Features & Functions

• Onstar MED-Net—physician info• Accident/Assist—guidance after an accident• Emergency Services—GPS tracking to emergency services• Remote Diagnostics—status of the car engine• Airbag Deployment Notification—Onstar checks on occupants• Stolen Vehicle Tracking—GPS tracking• Roadside Assistance—GM service provider to location• Remote Door Unlock—Unlock car at a specific time• Concierge Services—Vacation planning, travel bookings• Routing—Voice-Routing Navigation• Information—Locations of hotels, restaurants, Wall Street

Journal news read etc.

OnStar Reaches One Million

• Launched in 1996, subsidiary of General Motors– Partnerships with Bell Atlantic, Verizon Wireless

• Available on 32 of GM’s 54 models plus Lexus LS430 and Acura RL in U.S.

• Also Available since July 2000 in Germany under OnStar-Opel

• Monthly cost for 2001 Saab quoted at $34.95; first 12 months in sales price in U.S.

• Not available for many makes and models

OnStar US Competitors

• Mercedes-Benz S Class uses the COMAND system

• Nissan/Infiniti has the Communicator system• Jaguar has the ASSIST system• Ford/Lincoln has RESCU

– Active safety and warning controls in next generation and emergency-messaging coming

29 Million Subscribers

•Aug. 31, 2000 acquired by AOL

•Quack.com founded in 1998

•Oct. 25, 2000--AOLByPhone

The Move to “Read Me Anything”

• InternetSpeech—San Jose, CA– Provides Users Access to Any Web Page, all by

phone– Service cost: $19.95/mth with six hours a month– Plays well in international markets—Japan– June 2001: has entered into a revenue-sharing

pact with NeTrue Communications, Inc., (NTU.U:CDNX), a leading provider of IP-based communications solutions for licensing technology to ISPs and enterprises throughout China.

Total Speech Users

Speech Portal Users

Speech Portal Shoppers

in millions 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

16 22 32 48 96 128

45

18

28

12

18

8

2 5 11

310

Speech Portals: North American Usage Forecast

Source: The Kelsey Group (2000)

Usage Forecast

Current Value Proposition

• Safety--makes a wireless device safer to use in a vehicle providing a hands-free option

• Communications Mgmt.--via dialing by name, access voice messages, screen calls, deliver reminders, reservations, flight status, connection to proper customer service; bank acct. information

• Real-Time General Information—General News, Stock Quotes, Traffic Conditions, and Locations

• V-Commerce—Shop and transact• Entertainment—Choose audio channels

Increasing Value Proposition

Benefits

• Reduce Costs--reduces reliance on live operators

• Drive Revenue—voice applications can provide self-service 24/7 with outbound notifications

• Enhance Customer Service• Leverage existing Internet infrastructure to

deliver applications over multiple devices

VoiceXML 1.0

• Translates any XML-tagged web content into a format that speech-recognition software can deliver by phone

• VoiceXML Forum founded by AT&T, IBM, Lucent Technologies and Motorola (now 300 companies)

• Recent advances in speech allows for accents and dialects in as many as 20 languages around the world

• Developers using products like TellMe Studio, IBM WebSphere Studio 3.5, and WebSphere Voice Server SDK

• Vendor Specific Grammar Critical

Building Your Own App

CT Labs Commissioned by CommWeb, a CMP Publication, to test VoiceXML Development Kits—2001Results

Specialized Apps: Vocent Unveils Password Manager

• Automates password reset headache– Includes speech recognition verification

• ROI in 3 to 6 months• Deployable in less than 3 days

– Garter Group reports 30% of all calls to corporate help desks are for passwords

• Cost: $20 per call for having a human answer

ASP

Advertising

Transactions

Bounties

Infrastructure

Carriers

$3.80$1.60

$2.80

$1.90

$1.00$1.20

Speech Portal Revenue Analysis (2005)

*in billions of dollarsSource: The Kelsey Group (2000)

Final Frontiers

Obstacles to Voice Portals

• Need for significant marketing investments• Difficulty that people have in retaining audio

delivered information• Clunky menu navigation by voice• Need for more business applications

The Future

• 2-3 years: “natural language understanding” systems will be able to deal with wider range of commands– Responses like, “o.k., yep, right, affirmative”

• 5-7 years: Systems capable of conversational dialogue will be able to extrapolate context and meaning to respond

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