Cellphone users can now retrieve and reply to their e-mail when a PC is not available. A new service has been launched in South Africa, and to South Africans travelling in the UK and the USA, whereby they can pick up their e-mail over the telephone through two-way spoken communication with their mail server. The service has been launched in a joint venture between local business convergence specialist Complex-IT, and UK-based Vocalis, a company specialist.
"SpeechMail lets the user access e-mail over any telephone and even reply in the form of a short voice recording," explains Complex-IT group chairman, Ronnie Sarkin. "This will be very convenient during the coming holiday season when most users do not have access to their PCs. For South Africans travelling internationally, accessing e-mail is not always convenient. It`s cumbersome to carry a notebook around and an international call to your ISP from a hotel room is expensive. Internet cafes are an option but are often not conveniently located. SpeechMail allows you to hear your e-mail messages over the phone. It recognises your voice instruction, speaks the contents of your e-mails to you, and replies to the sender with a recording of your voice. Because it works with all POP and IMAP mail servers, no additional hardware or software is required, only a telephone."
Michael Renzon, managing director of Complex-IT Vocalis says that Complex-IT has set up an international roaming option for existing corporate SpeechMail customers who will be travelling to the UK or the USA. In the USA, the Vocalis site is located in Houston, Texas. "While calls from outside Houston will be billed as long distance," he notes, "the cost is still much cheaper than calling South Africa. Connection is immediate and the service takes far less time than dialling up, logging in and browsing, so the communication cost is far lower. In the UK, the service is even cheaper to use as Vocalis has an 086 local call service from anywhere in the country."
Many ISPs have signed up as SpeechMail users, and are already offering the service to dial-up subscribers and companies. For Vocalis Roaming, the charge is lb5 or R55 at the current exchange rate for a maximum of three months at a time. Users who plan to be in the UK or USA for longer than three months are required to sign up with a local ISP that provides SpeechMail. Once on the service, users can retrieve e-mail by stating their account number and PIN. SpeechMail lets the user know how many messages there are, what the headers are, who they are from and when they were sent.
The user can navigate using speech or the telephone keypad. Options include play, reply, delete and skip.
"It`s a convenient and cheap way to maintain contact with people without the hassle of having to find a PC with an Internet connection and a browser," adds Renzon. "The convenience principle is equally important for people on the move in South Africa too, as a rapidly increasing number of users are finding out."
SpeecHTML enables people to access and obtain audio information from any Website, written in standard HTML, using only a telephone and spoken commands.
"It`s a low cost, rapid time to market solution for companies and organisations wishing to extend their Internet service to the larger population through a telephone," says Renzon. "The combination of speech recognition, text-to-speech and Internet technologies means that you can optimise your Website investment by reaching a wider audience than Internet surfers alone. No browser is required. By calling a number unique to your SpeecHTML service, anyone with a telephone can interact with the information you choose to provide."
SpeecHTML enables Websites to provide self-service applications to callers. Advanced speech recognition and text to speech conversion are integrated into a gateway package to allow people to speak to a Website and get all the information they need. It allows companies to offer their own interactive telephone services without having to set up expensive call centres or purchase anything other than a Website and a SpeecHTML license. The service enables businesses to implement a wide range of self-service applications, which can be changed and updated simply by making changes to Web pages.
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