Excerpts from a recent self interview:
What is Voice 2.0?
Voice 2.0 is a new cuisine on the street.
How do they cook it?
It is a mashup of web and legacy telecom services.
Who is the cook?
Not you and me. It is usually the web developers. And they could be independent or working for an enterprise or a telco or a software company.
What are the ingredients?
VoiceXML and SIP etc. Maybe also those Parlays and Ajax and Camel etc. I don’t know much about that stuff.
What are the dishes on the menu?
You mix things around and you define your own menu and dishes. Just like a lot of Web 2.0 stuff is user generated content, you can extend the analogy and say Voice 2.0 is about user generated features.
Can everybody cook these dishes?
No. That is where the analogy ends. Not all can cook because you need to be able to handle the ingredients listed above.
And so if all users are not able to cook these dishes, why call it Voice 2.0?
Don’t extend the analogy too much. Analogies can be misleading.
Ok, we need to be professional cooks to make these dishes. But are we at the stage where the pros can generate and customize their own features?
Not on a mass scale. But soon.
Any other stuff apart from user generated features which we can regard as Voice 2.0 realm?
Perhaps the Web 2.0 influence extends into voice to the extent that provisioning of things like IP Phones and other VoIP elements is web based and certain offerings like hosted PBX and PC-to-Phone have web interfaces. Then you also have applications coming purely from the web world such as the voice-enabled IM which gets integrated into Voice 2.0 a well. Some people regard that as Voice 2.0 but I don’t.
Why don’t you regard that as Voice 2.0?
Because in these scenarios you are either adding another interface in from of a PC or something similar, or you are using an application which you do not control.
One last question. If consumers are left out of this user generated features thing, why call it Voice 2.0?
You are right. We need a Voice 3.0 to really conclude the story.