What is Voice Missing?
I came across a white paper on HD Voice today, that caused me to wonder what the future of Voice in communication is. Several years ago, when the term Voice 2.0 was coined and we organized a conference by that same name, there was a belief that a voice enabled web was going to change the telecom landscape, and trigger an explosion of voice enabled apps . What the big guys were referring to as Unified Communications would change everything.
Well, it is now some time later and there has been lots of change, but Voice, if anything, appears to have become relatively less important with the continued growth of Text and Visual based social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Youth – the vanguard of communication technology users – spends an incredible amount of time in real-time and near real-time communication that doesn’t involve voice, but instead uses; chat, texting, Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms that don’t make significant use of voice communications. Near real-time visual and text based communication has overtaken voice as the primary communication mode on mobile devices for younger users. And unlike in the early years, this is not due to a cost advantage of these applications over voice. In the case of the older crowd, email remains the communication medium of choice, even for many real-time communications (thanks in large part to the Blackberry push service). So why not voice?! After all, voice offers more nuanced communication, enabling both richer, and more intimate communication. So what is missing to make voice a more attractive communication mode today?
