New Hope For Finger Fatigue

Mark Willingham's ebullient, happy-go-lucky nature and frequent usage of the word “awesome” might wear thin if it didn't come across as entirely genuine. With surfer looks and a California-by-way-of-Indiana nice-guy demeanor, it seems like he could sell democracy to a dictator.

The job before him might be nearly as challenging. As vice president of marketing at HeyAnita, the voice recognition software company based in Los Angeles, Willingham has been busy promoting the company's new messaging platform, Rapid Message Service (RMS), in the midst of an increasingly competitive market for both messaging and enterprise productivity services.

RMS falls into both categories, and possibly a new one — messaging services for people who don't like to type text messages. “Only about 18% of mobile subscribers [in the U.S.] use text messaging, and there are reasons for that,” Willingham said. Though those among us who fancy ourselves as cosmopolitan chalk up low usage to “cultural differences” between users in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, Willingham said the real reasons might be both more specific and surprisingly basic.

“Text message typing is too much of a burden for some people,” he said. “A lot of new technologies have encumbered users in a way that discourages growth.” Though that sounds like a cultural difference, it's one that's more rooted in economics. “When text messaging usage first took off in Europe, it was often a cheaper alternative to voice,” Willingham said. “Now, it has become a learned activity. The same situation doesn't exist at this point.”

Yet, it's difficult to convince users they can get their point across quicker and more efficiently through messaging when it takes them several minutes to type what they want to say.

HeyAnita is positioning RMS as a relatively simple remedy. The service allows mobile users to call into an application server, speak the name of someone they wish to contact, record a short voice message, and press one button — usually, but not necessarily, the “1” on their keypads — to send the message to the recipient's mobile phone. The recipient is alerted to the message not by the phone ringing, but by the less intrusive SMS alert. The SMS notification describes who sent the RMS and how to listen to it. The message can last up to 27 seconds, which Willingham suggested is comparable to the 160-character text message limit on most phones. The recipient can easily reply with his own RMS by hitting a single button and recording his own message.

Though the one-button approach sounds like a feature for a new push-to-talk style of device, RMS actually works with any 2G or better phone, on either packet- or circuit-switched networks. The RMS software, currently in Version 3.1, integrates the RMS' server speech recognition capabilities with a user's existing mobile phonebook to find recipient phone numbers. HeyAnita didn't want to co-develop a service with handset providers that might have taken a year or more to be shipped commercially. In developing RMS, HeyAnita was determined not to make it a data feature dependent on when mainstream data acceptance and advanced device availability became a reality. “Deploying something today that won't reach critical mass for a few years won't really help anyone,” Willingham said.

That effort gives HeyAnita a definitive advantage in promoting mainstream adoption of RMS, according to Adam Guy, wireless analyst with Compete (Guy was with The Yankee Group when he evaluated RMS a few months ago.)

“RMS fills the immediate need for communication solutions that do not require users to engage in live telephone conversations or require them to type messages on their phones,” he said, adding that new services such as push-to-talk and multimedia messaging services face hurdles such as interoperability and device readiness.

One of the more compelling aspects of RMS is that the intended RMS recipient also doesn't need to be an existing RMS client to receive the message or reply to it. However, prompts during the reply process will help the recipient self-provision RMS for himself. “Users can self-provision the service, and their address books will self-populate as they receive RMS messages, which reduces the marketing burden and provisioning costs to carriers,” Guy said.

“It's extremely viral,” Willingham added. “You don't have to determine if someone has the capability. When you send them an RMS, you give them the capability. You start a chain of messaging, and that is what messaging is supposed to be all about.”

Users who get addicted to that messaging chain can sign up for RMS through HeyAnita's Web site. While the company is doing its best to avoid the long product development cycle of handset vendors, HeyAnita doesn't necessarily want to be hawking its solution from just one storefront. The company is interested in working with carriers that want to bring new services to enterprise users who carry their mobile phones around the office, but aren't always interested in answering every call.

For service providers, HeyAnita is marketing RMS both as an in-network solution and a hosted ASP offering. The company is aware that RMS is just one service in a long line of data-oriented applications that overwhelmed carriers are trying to evaluate, so the ASP route is intended to get RMS in front of carriers and users without adding management headaches. Willingham said the company is currently hosting the service for two large carriers that might bring RMS in network if they find acceptance to be strong enough.

Earlier this year HeyAnita started user trials that suggested just how viral its RMS offering could be. In the trials, about 23% of the people who received an RMS replied with their own RMS, and 40% followed up by using RMS to reply to the initial reply. About 57% of enterprise users participating in the trial said they were interested in using RMS full time. “One of the reasons they felt that way is because the RMS gives some context to information or requests being made of people that e-mail doesn't,” Willingham said. “And with an RMS coming to their mobile phone, they'll get the RMS before they get back to their desk to get the e-mail.”

Guy said the fact that the service will work with any SMS-enabled mobile might help it get a foothold among the broad cross-section of users and device generations that still exist in the market. Still, he also suggested there are challenges to adoption. While the user interface for the service is good, “there is room for improvement,” he said.

Matthew Vartabedian, wireless enterprise analyst at iGillottResearch, said that while the service's open network and device capabilities are a plus, his agency research has shown most new mobile enterprise services are often rolled out to “smaller, homogenous groups of mobile workers who all receive the same device, which operates on the same wireless WAN and of course has its own wireless data applications built in.”

That means it might be more likely for RMS to find adoption if it proves itself to have added value on top of other applications, Vartabedian said.

One of the ways RMS might be able to provide that additional value is through a mass-distribution feature. A supervisor in a corporate enterprise could record and send an RMS to everyone in his mobile phonebook, a faster option than mass e-mailing or other forms of contact. “The ‘one to many’ messaging feature is one of the cooler aspects of the application,” Vartabedian said, though he acknowledged that e-mailing and group push-to-talk capabilities do achieve similar results.

Willingham acknowledged that HeyAnita is continuing to enhance the user interface.

Also, Guy said, “RMS could appear to end users as just another mailbox or service to manage and pay for.”

The company isn't so concerned about infringing on traditional messaging, and Willingham said he thinks use of RMS will help warm U.S. users up to other forms of messaging. And, though there are some similarities, HeyAnita isn't lining up against increasingly popular push-to-talk solutions. “Push-to-talk is an evolution in live conversation. This is different because it is an alternative to the live conversation,” Willingham said.

Messaging is something of a new direction for HeyAnita. The company was founded in 1999 by three principal consultants from Microsoft's large enterprise consulting business. The company's core products traditionally have been in the area of voice recognition, and RMS uses that technology to help drive its new applications, but with RMS, HeyAnita really is branching off into enhanced messaging. The strategic shift is driven both by opportunity and necessity. Mobile messaging already is a huge hit worldwide, and now the U.S. market is beginning to heat up with the expansion of 2.5G and 3G networks.

Yet, the market for voice recognition and speech navigation technologies may be stumbling. These technologies have had quality problems, and several key voice recognition vendors have merged within the last two years. More recently, the market took a hit from a National Highway Safety Administration study that suggested voice-dialing solutions, which have been heavily marketed to customers who talk while they drive, have not reduced car accidents in which phone usage was considered a factor.

“Voice isn't always the best interface, but it's one of many,” Willingham said. “Uncontrolled noise can affect that voice recognition experience. That drove our evolution to this technology. We have been a leader in voice recognition, and we're still doing it, but this is the new direction of the company.”