Google Expected to Target Phone Search

What's the next big killer app from search companies? Quickly and easily searching telephone calls for a particular word or phrase—in essence, to Google your calls—is a likely candidate. And it isn't as far off as it might seem.

In the past two years, a number of customer service calling center operators for hire, some with thousands of employees working at the phones, have invested in the technology to identify inept operators and other measures of quality control.
While that's far from a mainstream scenario, these pioneering commercial applications are nonetheless an important first step toward a future in which phone calls will be among the Web pages available by visiting Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

Indeed, Ferris Research analyst Richi Jennings said, leading search engine giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN could introduce rudimentary searchable voice services right now.

"The big three of search could all do a good enough job of it to be of some value," Jennings said. "I do see adding into the search universe the ability to search what you said in phone calls." While acknowledging such a feature is conceivable, and in some cases being worked on, executives from major search companies cautioned during recent interviews that it will be a long, slow slog to get there, and each will have to battle any number of factors beyond each companies' control.

"We are definitely evaluating whether to make available a feature like searching voice calls and voice mail and other advanced voice features," said Yahoo spokesperson Terrell Karlsten.

Analysts envision searchable voice applications that would help companies more easily comply with records-intensive Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance mandates. More mainstream applications would turn home phone call history into a searchable database to find telephone numbers, names, addresses or even documenting the type of calls someone makes.

Some analysts even believe phone calls will be listed among the results from using search engines design to mine information stored on someone's computer.
One reason searchable voice applications now appears on technology's horizon is because of the growing consumer interest in VOIP (voice over IP), which is freely available software that lets someone make phone calls using his or her Internet connection.

By treating the phone calls just like a Web page, e-mail or Instant Message, VOIP service providers create yet another Internet-based application for search engines to capture, archive and search.
VOIP calls also makes the transcribing process involved in a searchable voice feature much easier because of their revolutionary technology behind them.

The calls are digitized, and then packaged in routing instructions known as the IP, which is the most common way for machines of all kinds to communicate.
It was IP that, in essence, created the common language that Google and other search engines rely on.

For now, though, there are only a relatively few number of VOIP users—an estimated 5 million in the United States, according to several estimates.
Yet VOIP is clearly on the minds of each of the top search companies, and even companies like eBay that seem an unlikely choice to become a telephone operator.

On Aug. 9, Yahoo formally unveiled Yahoo Messenger with Voice, a version of Yahoo's Instant Messager that improves upon the call's sound quality.
Microsoft this week said it had acquired San Francisco-based Internet phone company Teleo.

Future versions of MSN Messenger, Microsoft's instant messaging application, will use Teleo's technology in order to let users make calls from PCs to land-line or mobile phones.

Also, VOIP has a rosy future, according to some analysts. VOIP lines are expected to grow significantly to 25 million in the next two years, or about 20 percent of the total number of traditional home phone lines in the United States.
Another positive sign for searchable voice is that speech recognition, which plays a critical role in the process, is improving and becoming less expensive. Once just able to spot a particular word, companies including U.K.-based Autonomy, a call center specialist, has developed technology to recognize spoken phrases, a quantum leap in effectiveness.

The company also recently purchased Irving, Texas-based eTalk, a provider of call center technology. The combination will hasten the adoption of searchable voice, believes eTalk marketing director Kathy Kuehne.

Baby steps are being taken when it comes to archiving all those calls into a searchable database, for now a big investment in machines and manpower.
It's such a daunting task that Google isn't archiving the PC-to-PC phone calls capable among users of Google's relatively new GoogleTalk, its instant Messaging application. (IM is predominantly designed to be a stripped-down version of e-mail).

Yahoo, Microsoft to Link IM Networks

Yahoo and Microsoft are linking up their IM networks to allow MSN and Yahoo Messenger users to communicate across the two platforms, creating a global network of more than 275 million strong.

The agreement brings actual federated IM to the industry after years of mostly talk about the prospect. During a press conference today, the companies said being able to instant message between IM communities is one of the features most requested by MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger users.

The deal means that, in addition to exchanging instant messages, consumers from both communities can see if friends are online or not, swap emoticons and generally communicate without being on the same IM network. Yahoo and Microsoft said they would launch the interconnectivity capabilities between MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger in the second quarter of 2006.

The two companies will look into providing more enhanced features, such as PC-to-PC VoIP, once they get the new IM network servers up and running, which will be based on the SIMPLE protcol. For the time being, IM enhancements will focus on PC-to-PC communications, so Yahoo's recent acquisition of Dialpad Communications technology, picked up in part for its PC-to-Phone service, won't likely fall under that category.

Officials said complexity is the main reason they are not incorporating more features into the interoperable IM service next year. SIMPLE, while a proven technology, has not been scaled to the extent Yahoo and Microsoft want to deliver, they said.
"This is good for consumers; it's just a lot harder to do when you're flying an airplane as fast as these companies are flying and you want to change the engine at the same time," said Dan Rosensweig, Yahoo COO, in a press conference. "We have to get it right."

The combination of MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger networks could put a serious competitive dent in AOL's dominance in the IM world -- or bring the company closer to working out a federated IM deal with the other IM providers. Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL run the three largest IM networks in the world.
A recent study by research firm the Radicati Group reports some 867 million IM accounts worldwide today, a number expected to grow to 1.2 billion accounts in 2009. Public IM networks, such as AIM, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, primarily make up those numbers.

While Internet citizens have long called for interoperability between the top three, there has been no real serious work undertaken to let an MSN Messenger user talk to an AIM user or Yahoo Messenger user. Every once in a while, two of the three would come to the table but nothing ever came of those meetings.

Blake Irving, MSN communications services and member platform group corporate vice president, would not say whether recent talks with AOL touched on IM interoperability. Even if AOL and Microsoft were to come to some kind of agreement over federated IM, they probably wouldn't be able to do anything about it right now, he said in the press conference.

"The complexity of a deal like [Yahoo and Microsoft] and trying to execute is such that you can't do it with more than one partner at a time," he said.
When asked about a possible similar arrangement with Google, which launched its own IM service earlier in August.
"Certainly, we'd be willing to talk to them, but in terms of executing against the deal we described earlier, we've got to get this right," Irving said.
The closest public IM users have come to IM interoperability is through IM managers, such as Trillian, which lets users combine their AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, IRC, Jabber and ICQ identities under one console.