Roamware Launches Voice SMS Service

As the world’s most widely used messaging format, SMS is forecasted to be worth $50bn by 2010*. Roamware has built on this popularity by enhancing the power of SMS as a communications tool. Roamware’s Voice SMS provides a non-intrusive ‘Talk and Listen’ messaging mechanism that allows subscribers to deposit and exchange short peer-to-peer audio messages in near real time, or to deposit voice messages for convenient collection by the recipient. Traditional SMS is used both to notify the recipient and provide an access route to collect the voice message.

The service will appeal to users who are more likely to use messaging services than conduct real time conversations. Voice SMS provides the best of both worlds. It is more cost-effective and discreet than voicemail, and more expressive than SMS.

Voice message deposit and retrieval is aided by multilingual IVR prompts. Sent and received Voice SMS messages can be stored and repeatedly retrieved by subscribers, who can play, pause, and delete messages, as well as linking together all messages in the same ‘conversation’.

Roamware CEO Bobby Srinivasan said: “This is ‘talk and listen’ as an alternative to ‘type and read’. Voice SMS overcomes issues of language, literacy and regional etiquette, opening up new revenue streams without any additional investment in either infrastructure or handset design.”