The Hypervoice Consortium Launches
Martin Geddes, a telecom expert and founder of Martin Geddes Consulting, last week launched the Hypervoice Consortium, whose principle mission is to advance Hypervoice standards, capabilities, and applications. Telefonica Digital, HarQen, and Voxeo Labs have joined Geddes as charter members of the Hypervoice Consortium.
Hypervoice is an emerging model for organizing and navigating voice conversations. By converting voice into a native Web object, Hypervoice conversations become searchable and shareable, in any language.
For example, enterprise social media conversations exist only in text today. By moving voice into the activity stream of our daily online workflow, Hypervoice conversations can transcend the limitations of text and become searchable, shareable assets.
"We are excited to support this initiative both because it extends the reach of voice and because it makes working globally ever so much easier," said Tracy Isacke, head of the Silicon Valley office of Telefonica Digital, in a statement. "Being part of a leading telecommunications company that operates around the globe, this innovation will help us internally and externally."
"The ability to annotate audio conversations provides tremendous business value, as people can now discover the information shared in meetings and, more importantly, take action on it without losing the context in which it was shared," said Alan Lepofsky, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, in a statement
Another one of the early Hypervoice evangelists is Jason Goecke, president and CEO of Voxeo Labs. "With the launch of Voxeo Lab's Ameche, we introduced the world's first communications platform-as-a-service. We are working now to provide operators with Hypervoice-enabled applications on the Ameche platform, which will allow carriers to embrace Hypervoice fully as a key innovation," he said in a statement.
In October, the first Hypervoice application was showcased at Oracle OpenWorld by HarQen, an early pioneer in intelligent voice services. HarQen added Hypervoice conversations as a service to Oracle Social Network, allowing collaborators to go from typing to talking, and then capturing their conversations, with just a click.
"Hypervoice conversations hold the promise of enabling a whole new paradigm for human communications," said E. Kelly Fitzsimmons, co-founder of HarQen, in a statement. "We are eager to partner with others via the consortium to help ensure the richness of future applications."