Dec 3rd, 2008 |
By way of Aswath Rao’s status update on Facebook I had the opportunity today to discover “Fonolo“, a rather intriguing application that merges the Web 2.0 and telephony worlds.
Fonolo translates IVR prompts into a web-based menu, classified by company. Need to call a company and don’t want to go through a series of prompts? Find the company’s listing on Fonolo, scan to the point in the IVR you want to reach, and click to call it directly. Fonolo places the call for you, navigates to the right spot, then rings your phone to connect the call.
This, like Google’s Grandcentral, is another fantastic idea that merges the voice and Web 2.0 worlds together. In addition, Fonolo allows you to take notes for each call, and assign them to a particular company’s listing. Fonolo uses voice recognition to detect IVR changes, and automatically update their database.
Of course there’s still that issue of a business model. Will people pay for this service? Probably not. Will an ad supported model work? (”stand by while Fonolo connects your call, and listen to a word from our sponsor”), again, probably not. Would this be a great feature for one VOIP vendor to use to differentiate itself from another? Perhaps.
Irwin,
Thanks for the post!
The comparison with GrandCentral has come up before. I like to think of GC as a tool for managing your inbound calls (which callers get routed to which of your phones at what time of day), while Fonolo is about making your outbound calls smarter.
Regarding business model, I agree with most of your thoughts. We’ll have some exciting announcements in Q1. Stay tuned!
- Shai
Fonolo CEO
Thanks Irwin, very interesting. I’ve thought on and off over the last several years that the great power of voice UIs is limited by the fact that voice decision-making trees must be traversed at worm’s-eye view level, with sequential access protocols.
This is a great idea, and I think it is premature to think about business models yet. I think these guys should develop a few more variants on this basic idea and keep innovating. Somewhere in here is a very powerful concept that could radically change the UI industry. I’d like to see if these guys can come up with solutions to the reverse challenges: using voice to efficiently traverse a visual UI, with or without visual feedback.
Venkat