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The company announced on Wednesday that it will launch its new "talking e-mail service" using technology licensed from Irish company Red Circle. The agreement between the two firms was first announced in June 2001 but according to Andrew Conlan-Trent, director of marketing for Esat Fusion, that announcement was made at the very early stages of the technology's introduction.
"This is a first for this type of service anywhere, and so it took nine months to work out the bugs in the technology. But we took our time and tested the service carefully and now its ready to launch," Conlan-Trent told ElectricNews.Net.
Conlan-Trent said that the company expects the service to be very popular with small businesses and their employees who find that they are out of the office frequently, but need to check e-mails regularly. "This is really the first in a whole new range of products that are voice enabled and it's the direction that the industry is heading in," he said.
The service is available to users with access to a phone and an e-mail account with either iol.ie, iolfree.ie, Oceanfree.net or Esatclear.ie. To apply for the service, which costs EUR155 per year, users must complete a registration form at www.esatfusion.com. The new service will be available 24 hours a day, all year long.
Interestingly, Esat's talking e-mail service uses a type of biometrics called voiceprinting to authenticate users who want to access the system, according to Conlan-Trent. However, users can also be authenticated using CPi verification, whereby the system recognises the particular phone that is accessing an account, in a similar fashion as caller ID services.
Esat's latest service is based on Red Circle's product, eVoice, which works by registering the speech patterns of users so it can understand a number of simple instructions, including recitation of an account number and a password. It then reads e-mail to users who are out of the office.
Through the service customers can listen to, browse and create e-mails, although e-mails that are delivered from the system are sent as audio files, not text-based messages.
With the widespread use of mobile phones and the introduction of new technologies, firms that make voice-based technology are poised to undergo rapid growth in the next few according to industry analysts.
IDC says that the biometrics technology market, which includes voice verification, reached USD118.8 million in 2000 and will continue to increase over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 50 percent. In a separate report the research company also says that the market for telephony speech processing software is expected to grow more than 50 percent a year to be worth over USD3.5 billion by 2005.
Red Circle, established in May 1998, offers two products Gimme & eVoice and its existing customers include Esat, Lucent, Xerox, APC, Compaq, Dell, Boston Scientific and CPG. For more information on the company visit http://www.red-circle.com
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