Voice recognition simplifies access to mobile blogs

Credit: CNET Japan
Voice Domain Service (VDS), a subsidiary of Advanced Media, announced a voice recognition service for mobile handsets. Dubbed as “Voice Domain Blog Service”, the new service will help users connect to the desired blogs from a cellphone through the voice commands. Blog owners must register their blogs’ names with VDS in order to be recognized when users shout the blog’s name into the speaker.

Business model

• Free of charge for cellphone users (users pay for the connection time)
• Blog owners to pay 19,600 yen ($167) for the registration and annual service
• First 1,000 registered will pay half – 9,800 yen ($83)
• From the second year the service fee goes down to 9,800 yen per year

The company hopes to sign up 2,000 blogs by March 2006 and to increase that number up to 25,000 before March 2008.

Value

The main idea behind this service is to simplify the access to blogs from cellphones by saving user’s efforts and time to type hard-to-remember URLs. For blog owners, the service brings a new way to be discovered by users in an innovative way.

Marketers will welcome the service as it allows them to use catchy phrases to promote products and services. Indeed, a blog can be created to promote a special event or to advertise a new product. Advertisers will need just to let customers know the phrase they need to say into the speaker in order to get a link to the promotional webpage from a cell phone. However, I still find the access method to this service cumbersome.

Access method from a regular cellphone:

1. Access vd-s.jp site
2. Select Voice Domain Search link to initiate a call to the server
3. Yell into speaker the desired blog’s name
4. Select search results link to view the found links
5. Select link to visit the desired blog

Access method from Symbian OS smartphones:

1. Start the launcher application
2. Yell into speaker the desired blog’s name
3. The launcher application will send the digitized command to the server and receive the search results
4. Select the desired link to launch browser to visit the blog