Despite an otherwise illustrious 150-year history, network voice conversations have suffered a dramatic drop from grace over the past two decades or so, a decline that roughly coincides with the introduction of email and messaging OTT alternatives.
Though still a staple of most businesses, regular telephony has become a bit of a dinosaur, a prehistoric alternative to other forms of business communications, whose outputs can be easily saved, forwarded, shared and ingested. A voice conversation, for the most part, is ephemeral, evaporating into thin air when both sides stop talking.
If voice were a flavor, it would be vanilla.
While telecommunications professionals were largely referencing analog lines in comparison to newer digital transmission vehicles when they coined the term POTS, it was probably no accident and a bit of foreshadowing that the P stands for Plain.
But all that is about to change. Long relegated to an afterthought, the value of voice is making a comeback. When fed into AI engines, voice conversations can enrich businesses of all sizes and types with actionable intelligence that makes them more productive and operationally efficient, while also increasing end-user satisfaction and loyalty.
The revitalization of voice services is not so much an enhancement, as a reclamation. Voice conversations have always held a trove of information beyond the exchange of words. The human voice is highly emotive, capable of conveying joy, sorrow, persuasion, urgency and a thousand other sentiments that can’t be captured in a transcript.
Think of the difference between listening to vs reading a voice conversation to the difference between reading Hamlet or being front and center at the Old Globe on opening night. It’s a completely different experience, with the live performance conveying thousands of cues and contextual nuances that text is bereft of.
Now, thanks to VoiceAI, communications service providers have the opportunity to reclaim and monetize all that previously untapped value in voice conversations. Emerging AI-powered applications can now ingest voice conversations in real time, seizing on both overt and subtle signals to instantly deliver timely and invaluable services that would otherwise be performed post-conversation or not at all.
Once vanilla, voice is now providing a rich palette of functionality and business value. Instead of keeping their best clients on hold or condemning them to death by IVR, law offices, medical facilities and other service-oriented businesses can instantly link them to a live AI agent. In a 911 situation, emergency aid providers will soon be able to dispatch an ambulance or law enforcement based on ambient sounds or even the breathing patterns of a distressed individual unable to speak.
That’s just a sampling of potential VoiceAI applications and use cases. The opportunity for innovation is limitless, as is the opportunity for communications service providers to recapture the value in their network by offering a new category of business and consumer services that OTT application providers can’t match.
That’s because, unlike applications that operate above, or outside, the network, CSP-delivered voice services have trusted access to the underlying network and its properties, like subscriber identity, network-derived location, QoS metrics and network telephony information.
Native-network capabilities make all the difference when it comes to homing in on contextual clues. The combination of conversational intelligence and network intelligence empower CSPs to understand intent, improve call quality and perform a host of other valuable actions in real time.
The bottom line is that the revitalization of voice is the best opportunity in decades to close a monetization gap that’s seen CSPs invest trillions in their networks over the years without cashing in on the revenue side.
CSPs can seize that opportunity by evolving their networks to an Intelligent Communications Fabric that links AI-enabled voice experiences to network infrastructure. That will put them in the perfect place to reclaim their rightful place in the voice services value chain.
Voice conversations are the new currency of the AI economy. Nothing plain or vanilla about it.
