Verascape unveils voice-enabled Web access

(Telephony) To Mark Huntzinger, Verascape’s marketing and business development vice president, a word is worth a thousand pictures--especially if that word is spoken to Web-access voice server technology his company is introducing today.

We believe that the best access to the Web is your own voice,” says Huntzinger. “The Web and HTML and XML are pretty faces onto a bunch of Web data. The data and voice interfaces can be similar interfaces to the same data.”

To Huntzinger, the Web is a place to store content, and the telephone is the way to access it. Forget the middleman, forget interactive Web sites, forget tons of money poured into making the graphics attractive for Web browsers.

“All the data would be the same, … but it’s a different interface to the same data,” he said.

Huntzinger admits that a “a lot of firms have spent the better part of the last five years enabling Web-based interfaces for a lot of their internal data and external data.” He wants to offer those firms a way to make that information accessible without having to use the traditional point-and-click computer method.

Verascape’s first--and, possibly, its only--customers will be the ASPs who would pay between $1300 and $2200 for a telephone port, depending on volume, service and maintenance.

“We’re in trials,” Huntzinger said. “As of yet, we don’t have any paying customers. We are beginning our trials now, and we’re going to be in general availability the end of the first quarter, first part of the second quarter.”

That should give Verascape plenty of time to beat the drums about its service.

“There’s a huge potential market for speech-enabled services, … [and] over the next three or four years, you’re going to see that.” Huntzinger said.

Obvious uses are portal applications like driving directions, weather and stock quotes--services that naturally lend themselves to voice-enabled applications, he said.

But that’s just the fringe, according to Huntzinger.

“Think of a pharmaceutical rep or someone like that going between visits, wanting to get access to the same data other folks get via the Web after all their sales call are done. Imagine how powerful a tool this could become.”