Moving Beyond Plain Vanilla Voice

More than a year ago PhoneGnome CEO David Beckmeyer posed the question Where are the Voice 2.0 developers? We're still waiting for the answer, says FierceVoIP editor Doug Mohney in his post, Pulver's Purple Prophesies--And Fallout Thereof, charting VoIP's journey from industry-disrupting new technology to plain vanilla status quo.

If you've been around the VoIP space any length of time you've heard plenty about the uber-cool applications that digital voice was going to bring us. Well, we have mobile personal ads from Jangl -- wait, didn't Jangl go under a few weeks ago?

Let's face it, whether you call it rich voice or Voice 2.0, the pickings are slim. Talk about the impossible dream. Searching Google News on "rich voice VoIP" yields three hits. One is about fax-over-VoIP and the other two are about the same services for public safety agencies. Not exactly paradigm-shifting.

A decade later the VoIP industry has barely scratched the surface on the opportunity presented by turning phone calls into data. The last VON show in San Jose was all about new variations on the century-old theme of making and delivering phone calls. Like one more Baskin Robbins flavor -- it's still just ice cream. A new Skype handset is still...a handset.

Instead of making more ice cream maybe we should think about making something new -- using the flexibility that VoIP opens up for making business operations smarter, more efficient, and more effective.

For example, add a short IVR to capture information like address or account number to route calls to the nearest office, look up account information or schedule a service call. Or think outside the phone call envelope altogether, as PEAK Technologies has done in its voice-based supply chain applications.

Just as we no longer write separate applications to update customer name in the accounts receivable and customer order systems, it's time to stop silo-ing voice in something called the "phone system." But that's not going to come from the VoIP industry -- it's still too busy making cheap phone calls.