Telepocalypse

Read this now

As Stuart Henshall has been pondering the economics of attention, I thought I'd add in my own experience.

Way back in 1991 I had a summer student job at a small company called NextBase that produced mapping software called AutoRoute. I did sundry C programming, box packing and digital map editing. Soon after I left the founders sold out to Microsoft, getting considerably richer in the process. People paid big money -- hundreds of pounds -- for the full-featured versions.

Now you can pull scrollable, zoomable maps off the Web in moments and have directions from any A to any B returned in a flash. Client PC apps are relegated to niche applications for disconnected use, or with a GPS receiver. Instead, the value of the map is the attention of the user and a momentary opportunity to highlight a few relevant ways they might choose to spend some of their money in the vicinity.

Now, how hard is it to imagine a multi-modal device where you make "free" calls to businesses, but their upsell marketing message is displayed at the crucial moment? And any guesses whether it's the telcos or the Net giants who are likely to capture any such revenue?

Disappearing telephony

I'm just stepping back a minute to think about what Emerging Telephony actually is.

You might have seen my earlier musings on the different philosophical underpinnings of "Western" telephony and "Eastern" thought. In an oversimplified nutshell, the Western approach puts the individual in the centre of the universe. The Eastern idea is to put the group in the middle.

I see "conversation" as being the shadow of a group. So future telephony may look quite different from PSTN-style calling and even philosophical cousins like Skype. We don't put groups or conversations at the centre of our "Voice 2.0" telephony experience. This could provide a philosophical problem to all the VCs and geeks here at ETel.

Here's a concrete example. Teens are group-centric. They need to belong, get group affirmation. They send a zillion SMS messages to wring a group experience out of the technology they have.

But imagine if members of the group could see when other members of the group are in a conversation (IM or voice). Then you can (virtually) walk up and try to join in. It requires some digital social gestures that mimic a conversation pause and turning to allow the new person into the ring.

Hey! Telephony is supposed to be a substiute for "being there". This is the kind of "presence" experience that today is totally missed. (Presence isn't just smiley icons, folks.) "Voice 2.0" doesn't even mimic the real world yet, let alone exceed it. And many of the ETel examples are still hamstrung by the legacy thinking of 120 years of circuit 2-person telephony where presence is a 4th class citizen. We've still got some learning and exploring to do.

UPDATE: Another example: Skype's grouping feature (bless them for the effort) is entirely manual. But what the users probably need is some kind of semi-automated grouping of contacts, based on call patterns, social network analysis etc. Personally, I wouldn't have bothered with the feature at all unless it was adding some serious "wow" and makes life for the users much, much simpler. Yes, I'm setting the bar high. But humans are sophisticated social animals, and it shouldn't come as a surprise if our conversation tools need to act intelligently too.

They told me

I was really impressed by the pitch from Tellme earlier today. (Although, despite them being great voice usability experts, their web site is a pile of Flash-infested crud.) I'd assumed IVR stuff was dull. On the basis you'll get the best insights from the session that superficially is least attractive, I selected this session. Turns out it was a good choice.

I really liked the idea as telephony as the most intimate medium -- a whisper in your ear. But what Tellme really have cracked is making the IVR experience much closer to interacting with a human, and not a string of audio files tacked together with some shell scripts. They played lots of examples of really, truly awful IVR experiences. And then what they did to them.

This is important because good experiences drive real business. The customer's impression of your business and brand is derived right from the experience they have. The example Tellme gave was UPS. Their old IVR system was very, very slow. The messages went on and on, slowly read. Do you really want UPS to be associated with "slow"? Thought not. Most of all, a good experience creates trust in your brand.

The first thing they've cracked is making the voice experience more seamless. They've created vast libraries of all sorts of clever combinations of phrases which get blended together by cognitive psycholgy and linguistics experts. And the result is super-impressive.

Their voice libraries go beyond what's known as "single prosody", the old-style IVR where you heard broken-up phrases glued together like "departing | Saturday. | July. | 22nd." Instead they have multiple prosody -- "departing | Saturday, | July 22nd" etc. (note the comma after Saturday.) It works. But they've had to record over 37000 WAV files just to read back numbers!

They've also cracked "points of co-articulation." You can't record every possible combination of terms. So record the first term followed by an example second one starting with one of the 40 phonemes in English -- "Hi John". Then record all the possble second terms: "James", "Jim", etc. Then splice in the right second term just in place of the example one. Again, the result is impressive.

You really can tell the difference in terms of comprehension and memory retention.

They also did a great pitch on optimising the usability of IVR systems. The phone is a linear presentation, and taxes short-term memory. You don't have a 2D screen with bold, drop-down boxes, etc. The boundaries are also invisible. It's not like the Web. There's a strong "recency effect" -- the last thing said ("press 0 for operator") is first thing remembered.

So they have a bag of tricks. Personalise. For example the sports team "squeaked by" if you support that side vs. "lost a close one to" if you don't. They "instruct as you go", deferring navigation instructions to the time they're needed. (Lazy evaluation always deserved a comeback...) They use "progress markers" - "First, tell us..." "Next," "Lastly". Adopt colloquial language, not written English. Optimise to meet user goals, not sub-tasks. And so on.

I've glossed over a lot of ineresting detail, and good stuff. If only they could put up a few corporate blogs and share their cool innovations and work on an everyday basis!

Emerging Telephony

Having fun here at Emerging Telephony I've been looking forward to this for a while, as it's more focused on my personal interest on the future of telephony than VON, which is more of a scattergun of all things VoIP.

I'm giving the closing keynote. If I get time I'll try to dismember my presentation and turn it into a blog post. No promises. Unless you send a big chque, in which case I'll promise whatever you want.

Runway discrimination

I landed at SFO yesterday. My airfare included some charges for airport fees which the airline itemises separately.

British Airways also got charged some money by the airport to land their plane. And because it was a 747, they got charged a lot more than the turboprop that followed us.

Not only that, but assume SFO is the only Bay Area airport with runways long enough for a 747. A local monopoly on longhaul traffic.

So we've got double-dipping and price discrimination of traffic.

Is this a problem? If not, why not? Or is freedom of travel a bad metaphor for freedom of speech, and a false analog?

What if Ed and Ivan could offer DSL for "free", if you were willing to restrict your activities to accessing preferred partners Yahoo and Amazon? Would this be a good or a bad thing?

We now return to blog silence, at least until the next time the urge to post overwhelms the urge to take a rest.

UPDATE: Some additional thoughts from a phone call I just had. People think of the roads as "free" common infrastructure. A few roads are built with tolls. Many roads get congested. Sometimes there are congestion charges (e.g. London, Stockholm) that impose a monetary charge to reflect that your journey has negative externalities for other people. But more usually charging money turns out to be a political hot potato, and everyone has to pay for congestion as a time cost. There's still a cost. We can even put a value on the wasted time, if somewhat less precisely. But a cost there most certainly is. So be wary of analogies between roads as infrastructure and Internet as infrastructure. The former is already shoulding a horrendous deadweight loss because of deficiencies of congestion and access pricing.

Popcorn and soda break

I'm tired.

Our smaller madam (age: 12 weeks) decided at 1am last night it was a great time to take an interest in the world, be wide-eyed, have a giggle, and demand some parental interaction.

I got to go to bed at 2.30am. Luckily I had some photo scanning to do to keep her amused.

The last 12 weeks have been hard. I'm going to shield her privacy a bit, and just say we've had a lot of time spent going to and from doctors and hospitals. Don't send sympathy. Show you really mean it - send money! ;) Anyhow, that bit of our life experience now seems to have come to a close. No panic. She's doing OK, will grow up as normal and healthy as fate allows.

But I need to stop crucifying myself over my to-do list. And one of those to-dos is to blog. I've got loads I want to write about. I've taken lots of photos, noted many ideas. I probably do have time. But I'm managing my energy budget instead.

So I'm taking a blog break. Just until the days get a bit longer, and my sleep a bit more regular. There's just too much to do for the day job, international conference travel, and, well, saying something to the wife other than "Shall I change her or you?".

My plan is to keep writing, just not to post. I've got some ideas I've been brewing for a year or two. Time to polish them up and put them in hard ASCII. Maybe I'll even get that book outline done. Somebody needs to write the definitive History of the Future of the Telephone Call.

Telepocalypse isn't going away. Your subscription will be honoured.

Chill.
PS - Those wishing to find me in an advanced state of jet-lag can locate me at Emerging Telephony in San Francisco on 24-26 January. I'll be back in the Bay Area the following week, but daytimes are spoken for already.