Following Orange’s launch of a $15.5 million promotional campaign in July of the Wildfire voice-activated personal assistant, the carrier said 20,000 subscribers have signed onto the service. Orange, the United Kingdom’s third-largest carrier with nearly 3 million customers, expects between 50,000 and 100,000 Wildfire users by the end of the year.
The Wildfire virtual assistant, from U.S.-based Wildfire Communications, can take messages, place calls and store contact names and numbers. Using voice commands, a user can listen to messages and return calls.
The Orange launch, which coincided with the U.K. opening of “Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace,” has helped the carrier further differentiate its service in the competitive U.K. market. Following the cinema advertising, the carrier mailed a series of direct-mail pieces to its subscriber base.
“The key things when we launched were simplicity and looking after the customer in the future,” said Richard Brennan, group commercial director of Orange. “We consider ourselves apart from other networks because they’re not (offering this type of service).”
Brennan said he anticipates 2000 will be a big growth year for Orange in terms of subscriber numbers.
In terms of overall new subscribers, 1999 has been a strong year for all four of the U.K. wireless carriers. In the third quarter, the United Kingdom added a record 2.7 million new customers, with Orange gaining about 555,000 subscribers during the period. Orange is betting that services like Wildfire will help it keep those new customers on the Orange network.
“People who take on Wildfire are using the phone more and tending to stay with the network longer,” said Brennan. “They are finding it a valuable tool.”
Ovum Analyst Dan Ridsdale predicts that by 2005, almost 40 percent of mobile subscribers in Western Europe will use a simple speech-recognition assistant. However, he sees the future of such services intertwined with the Web and Wireless Application Protocol-enabled devices. “If [users] can go to the Web and pick up a message, mobile operators have the opportunity to become a portal,” Ridsdale said.
But he doesn’t dismiss the benefits of being an early adopter. “For Orange, it reinforces their image as being an innovative mobile operator,” Ridsdale said. “One of the big values of these types of services is appealing to the most valuable customers. They account for 60 to 70 percent of a telco’s profits. Any service that can appeal to them and lock them in provides significant value to a network operator.”
The carrier did its homework before launching Wildfire. Orange spent 12 months testing the service. An American female voice was used in the early trials, and was quickly replaced with an English voice, tailored for the United Kingdom’s various dialects. The service also was localized, based on the trials involving 5,000 Orange customers.
“We researched a lot of different voices and received feedback on what worked and what didn’t,” said Brennan.
Wildfire established a separate office in September to focus specifically on the Latin American market, and Spanish is the next planned development language for the service, said Wildfire.
“Latin America has the biggest growth potential over the next five years,” said Mike Hartnett, Wildfire director of market development.
