I had a quick conversation earlier today with a vendor who was sitting in the departure lounge at SFO airport waiting for a flight. He is based in the UK, and this is roaming on a US network.
Here’s how the sequence of interactions went.
There are lots of places here where the telephony user experience broke.
Firstly, Skype’s device management is a total mess. I need to be able to tell Skype my #1 preference is for my USB headset, second choice is the USB handset I’m trying out. I want to set the PC built-in microphone to “never”, as I don’t have any such device; and my laptop doesn’t have a built-in microphone.
I should be able to take the call in Skype and then plug in my headset. In the meantime, Skype can play a message that says “The person you have called doesn’t have a headset plugged in, but has answered the call. Please hold.” The message would also be played in other appropriate languages to the country of the caller/callee. Elaborate as necessary to create ultimate experience.
Next, the voicemail I was left had a caller ID, but not a name or company. We need next-gen caller ID.
Furthermore, the contact details he dictated were rather hard to understand; he’s calling from a cell phone, and has a name that’s not exactly “Bob Smith”. And that’s from someone with the same southern English accent as myself, let alone something harder to decode. So we need a “calling card” system, too.
The UK number failed to convey the actual context of the caller and the time zone he is in.
The whole sequence around me interrupting someone who is trying to leave a voicemail to myself is a farce. In this case, Skype was in a position to fix it. When I call a number of someone who is already leaving me a voicemail, it should immediately give me the option to connect to that person directly.
Naturally, if he’d got on the plane before I called back and turned his mobile off, I’d want to know that before having a pointless interaction with his voicemail system. In-person, or nothing at all, please.
One final observation. In the world of IMS, his roaming would probably mean that the US telco would have to be involved in supporting a whole bunch of these advanced features. My prognosis: ain’t gonna happen. A few hundred lines of code in a software client over the Internet, or a few billion dollars of network kit to add QoS? Any guesses where the future lies? Answers on the back of a large denomination note to the usual address, please.
UPDATE: One last thought. If voicemail was just a mailbox with an API and a bunch of ID/authentication, then it’d make far more sense for his message to be recorded locally on the handset with a quality audio codec and then uploaded at leisure over the network without jitter and QoS issues than pretending “everything’s a circuit”.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:31 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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"Firstly, Skype’s device management is a total mess..."
I think the PC itself contributes somewhat to the confusion. A USB phone is an external soundcard with built in speaker & mic, and the fact is that until recently there was little reason for a PC to have two soundcards installed at the same time. The OS does not handle this very well, for example in my case when I plug in the USB phone, all the normal sound effects then come out of the USB phone too. This means that when the Skype (or other Softphone) rings, I can hardly hear it, and likewise if I get a message via an IM client, I often don't notice until it's too late. Maddenning.
You need:
1. iotum' relevance engine to manage and route your call appropriately
2. VoIPvoice's Cyberphone setup; it starts out with the headset as the audio device but on picking up a phone set, it automatically switches over the audio/mic handling.
Doesn't solve all your problem but gets it well down the path.
Posted by: at July 18, 2006 03:03 AMOr how about you just use a phone. Volume is always set right. The right "audio drivers" are always active. Etc. :)
What a great scenario - illustrating the bits that fall on the floor, and the ones that could do with a little polish. I'm torn about your comment that "telco's won't implement the vast majority of these features" with their adoption of IMS though. Without them, the whole world will go to self created VoIP in a handbasket, won't they?
Your idea of recording a VM on the handheld, and letting the handheld send it when network reception is good, is an outstanding one. Nicely disruptive.
-jules
Posted by: at July 19, 2006 12:46 PM