Comments on: Is There Money in Voice APIs?

By: With Ribbit, BT Is Rethinking Its Voice Business

With Ribbit, BT Is Rethinking Its Voice Business — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 03:43:46 +0000

[...] Large carriers have many things going for them: global infrastructure, deep pockets and the ability to sell to larger companies. Innovative VoIP startups, on the other hand, have the right ideas, but don’t have the footprint or the resources to grow, Griggs said. To that end, he added, “We are doing what we were doing at Ribbit at a much larger scale at BT.” Carriers provide the nuts and bolts including the software platform, and developers do the rest, he said. (Related post: Is There Money in Voice APIs?) [...]

By: Voip Setup

Voip Setup — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:52:52 +0000

i am ready to purchase a panasonic telephone/answering machine but would like to know why i should buy a 5.8 over a 2.4….i have quite different opinions in the stores thanks kerrie

EDITOR: Cordless phones are quite tricky, because they’re a combination of a telephone and a radio transmitter/receiver, you have the issues of range, sound quality and security that you do not have on a standard corded phone. Also different cordless phones of various frequencies may work/may not work in your house as each house has different appliances/structural issues which can interfere with it.

Generally speaking:

Dont buy a phone which uses 900 MHz because radio scanners can listen into them
Digital cordless phones will be more secure and have a better signal than analog phones.
There is no real benefit between 2.4GHz versus 5.8GHz phones, just go for the cheapest one. I don’t think you should spend more than $AUS 100 for a single handset cordless phone.

By: 8 Flexible, Open-Source (or Just Open) Telephony Resources

8 Flexible, Open-Source (or Just Open) Telephony Resources — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:04:47 +0000

[...] an influential young company in the VoIP arena, offers open APIs that facilitate many of the “voice mashups” — voice, data and applications that are combined to create new services — [...]

By: Jaduka CEO Thomas Howe on Telephony, Open Source and Innovation | google android os blog

Sat, 23 May 2009 15:31:10 +0000

[...] HTML-based application on any operating system. Jaduka’s APIs facilitate many of the "voice mashups" appearing on the web–applications where voice services, data and applications create [...]

By: VoicePHP: Indian Startup Marries Voice with PHP

VoicePHP: Indian Startup Marries Voice with PHP — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:34:27 +0000

[...] (API) tactics that have been tried by others; VoIP companies offering APIs to their platforms have struggled to attract developers to their platforms. Although some VoIP services such as Phweet and iotum’s Calliflower [...]

By: VoIP: Dead or Alive?

VoIP: Dead or Alive? — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:25:06 +0000

[...] that represented mediocrity and marginal ideas. While there is some hope on the horizon, but again we have been fooled [...]

By: Another Mashup using IfByPhone and Yelp | Web 2 Voice

Another Mashup using IfByPhone and Yelp | Web 2 Voice — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 02:14:52 +0000

[...] Is There Money in Voice APIs? [...]

By: Phweet: case study for consumer voice mashups « VoodooLabs’s Weblog

Phweet: case study for consumer voice mashups « VoodooLabs’s Weblog — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:10:46 +0000

[...] play out again a couple of week’s ago in Dameon Welch-Abernathy’s article “Is There Money in Voice APIs” – or, more specifically, in the nice line of commentary that the article produced. You can [...]

By: Jordan

Jordan — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:45:11 +0000

"I don’t put a lot of stock in the rumor that BT has purchased Ribbit for $55 million."

Yeah. $105 mil is more like it. :)

By: BT Buys Ribbit for $105 Million - GigaOM

BT Buys Ribbit for $105 Million - GigaOM — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:28:44 +0000

[...] seems to be a lot of interest in merging voice with Internet applications, but the whole process hasn’t been a slamdunk. Dameon Welch-Abernathy, in his post earlier this month pointed out: … Ribbit, a company [...]

By: British Telecom Buys Ribbit - GigaOM

British Telecom Buys Ribbit - GigaOM — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:25:48 +0000

By: The Weeks That Were 13 July - 27 July 2008

The Weeks That Were 13 July - 27 July 2008 — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 07:01:57 +0000

[...] Is There Money in Voice APIs? (From GigaOM) [...]

By: The Impact of Open Source VoIP | LucaFiligheddu.com

The Impact of Open Source VoIP | LucaFiligheddu.com — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:55:05 +0000

[...] next step is about APIs. Dameon aka Phoneboy wrote a very thoughtful piece for GigaOM which led to an interesting series of comments and other blog posts. In particular, I would like to [...]

By: Dameon Welch-Abernathy

Dameon Welch-Abernathy — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:49:48 +0000

It’s great to see the conversation continue here. I guess I hit a nerve!

Given Om’s piece on the downward spiral of the ad-funded economy (along with the rest of the overall economy, refer to http://gigaom.com/2008/07/17/why-silicon-valley-should-be-worried/ ), I have to call into question whether or not simply relying on ads to cover your costs will be enough, at least without some volume. For the VoodooVox folks, having a Plan B wouldn’t be a bad thing (e.g. getting more Nike-type deals).

Granted, any scheme involving monetizing voice APIs doesn’t have to make a ton of money, so long as it covers your overhead with a little extra Nothing wrong with being more modest in your returns or your expectations for them.

By: J. Scott Hamilton

J. Scott Hamilton — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:44:16 +0000

Hi there,

Scott Hamilton, pres/ceo of voodoovox here. I commented to a post by Om earlier today and mentioned our take on voice apis. I'll reiterate that here since the discussion is so lively.

We believe there are many interesting voice/web mash-ups just waiting to be built, and we're trying to foster their development through our free and very simple MyVox api. s we're all in the know on this thread, MyVox really is just a phone-based voice capture utility that passes a file to the developer to do with it what they will. I have no idea how novel that is compared to any service offered by others on this board, but I can tell you that in less that 3 months of release we have hundreds of developers who have utilized the service to generate very novel voice/web mash-ups, two of the most interesting being from Nike (a karaoke app for the Olympics; go to their basketball site) and a fun service from Ludacris's WeMix site. Together these app generate only a few million calls a month, but the number of apps is growing daily, and the killer app is just waiting to be developed.

Our revenue model is to provide the voice api for free in return for the rights to insert audio ads into the call stream (exception being Nike, who paid us). We take the calls generated by our MyVox api "publishers" and aggregate them with the calls generated by the rest of the VoodooVox network.

For us, voice is a feature that simply makes some apps/svcs better. We released our voice capture utility to get avails. And with the exception of Nike, I don;t think we have a simple publisher who would have paid for a solution. I don't know if that says anything for the voice api space in general, or just points out we have a distinct group focused on novelty apps more so than mission critical business apps.

By: Tony Rybczynski, Nortel

Tony Rybczynski, Nortel — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:07:02 +0000

In enterprise: 1. Voice will be an app within a broader set of functionality called Unified Communications. 2. Voice APIs will be part of a suite of UC APIs 3. These APIs will work into a SOA-enabled agile communications environment which will abstract these communications services to create communications enabled business processes. 4. It will be an open environment, working across multi-vendor and cross-domain (carrier-enterprise) environments. 5. Lots of money to be made in solutions, toolkits and professional services.

I discuss these trends in my blog at http://blog.tmcnet.com/the-hyperconnected-enterprise/index.html