Just as Sprint PCS was quick to offer wireless Web services, the company is jumping head first into the voice-recognition market, signing a new agreement with voice portal provider BeVocal Inc. to test speech-activated applications powered by BeVocal’s Total Voice Portal Solution.
The BeVocal deal comes months after Sprint announced a deal with voice-recognition technology provider Nuance to provide service for Sprint’s Voice Command offering.
BeVocal, which uses Nuance’s voice-recognition technology, said its Total Voice Portal was designed to deliver personalized, location-specific, voice-enabled services to subscribers.
“We’re excited to have Sprint PCS as the first nationwide provider to trial BeVocal’s private-label voice portal solution,” said Mikael Berner, chief executive officer of BeVocal. “From the start, we have developed our Total Voice Portal Solution with the carrier in mind, creating a product and business proposition that meets the rigorous demands of the telecommunications market.”
Customers who access BeVocal’s Total Voice Portal service can obtain driving directions, business locations, travel information, traffic reports, news, sports, weather and stock quotes by saying spoken commands. BeVocal also pointed out that all the information that customers receive from the service is sent directly from BeVocal.
“We are not scrapping public information from the Internet,” explained Mark Robinson, director of business development for BeVocal. “We are caching all the information until a customer request it. It is more of a challenge that way, but it provides us with a distinct competitive advantage over our competition.”
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The service includes worldwide flight information with up-to-the-minute flight information on major domestic and intentional carriers; nationwide traffic updates with real-time traffic information for the 65 largest metropolitan areas in the country; worldwide weather updates; and a nationwide business finder using a search engine for locating more than 1 million businesses nationwide representing 2,000 brands.
The services news information offerings include audio feeds of national and world headlines, as well as regular updates for business, technology, finance, sports, health and entertainment news; up-to-the-minute sports scores and highlights from professional and college sports, as well as updates for tennis, auto racing, golf, soccer and boxing; and stock quotes from the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq and Amex exchanges.
Robinson said additional challenges were involved in setting up the service to understand how people ask for information, especially company names. For instance, if a customer wants a stock quote for “big blue,” the service will know to provide the stock price for IBM.
In addition, Robinson noted that BeVocal’s voice interface is provided by professional voice personalities, an advantage over cheaper text-to-speech programs, providing the user with what it calls an “optimized user experience.”
Sprint said if the trials prove successful, it would offer the service as a possible “concierge-level” addition to its Voice Command service with features similar to General Motor’s OnStar telematics system. BeVocal said the comparison to OnStar is warranted and that it also plans to market the service to automobile manufacturers looking to add feature-rich telematics to their lineup.
Qwest Wireless is the only wireless operator offering BeVocal’s Total Voice Portal service today to customers in eight western and midwestern states. Qwest plans to charge customer $5 per month for the service, though it is waiving that charge through Jan. 31 of for current and new subscribers.