Voice and Data
July 1, 2006
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in

Interview with Taranjit Batra, V.P. Sales for South Asia, Kirusa Inc.

What is the underlying principle of your voice SMS application? How is it different from voice mail?
Voicemail is a facility offered by the recipient to the sender but an SMS is something that is offered by the sender. In voice SMS, a machine gives the messages in the form of voice instead of text and of course with a personal touch.

Indian subscribers rarely use voice mail service. How do you plan to change it?
Voicemail as a concept is not popular in India unlike the US. This is because, we Indians do not like to talk to a machine. We want to make our own presence felt, not a machine’s one. So in VSMS enables the listener to listen the exact voice of the messenger. In text messaging, one needs to know about the language that the handset supports but in the case ofVSMS, you don’t need that. You can send your VSMS in your mother tongue. So it will eliminate the language barrier. And the experience of VSMS should be same as that of text SMS, that means, it should be free of cost for the receiver.

How is your application different from that of others?
The recently launched service has redefined the earlier voicemail service. In this case, if the service is within the same service provider then it works fine. But it is different when the service goes to different service provider. For example if a Reliance customer sends aVSMS to another Reliance subscriber, then its fine, he’ll get an SMS but if the same subscriber wants to send a VSMS to an Airtel subscriber, then the Airtel subscriber will get an outbound call. One can pick up the phone and receive a machine telling him that you’ve got a VSMS from this number.

How will your application help service providers increase their revenues?
It will eliminate the language barrier. It has a huge scope in rural areas. Example of an agro market (Mandi) can be taken into acount where the mandi manager announces the price of various crops and products at various stages of the market, depending upon what product the farmers sell. For farmers, it is a vital information. What can be done in this case is, even without going to the market himself, a farmer can get real life experience of listening to the middleman or the mandi manager’s voice, that would be provided by the service provider by VSMS. They could later sell their products.

What are the applications that can run on the voice message platforms?
The platform used by Kirusa has the ability to manage and synchronize data and voice interactions, plus its integration with IMS and 30 standards enable customers to cost effectively deploy additional revenue generating services. We call it multi-modality. It seamlessly combines graphics; text and audio output with speech, text and touch input to deliver dramatically enhanced end user mobile experience.

When can we get to use this service in India?
We are in talk with almost all the service providers in India and according to the progress, what we expect its implementation by the end of this year.

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