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Americas Issue: December 2005
For Starters
Cell Phone or Microphone?
by Georgia Mullen
While mobile phone users in the U.S. are fretting over the number of bars they have, Asian youth are chattering into their cell phones, finding love, singing karaoke, and banking on advice from horoscopes and fortunetellers.
With an 80 percent to 90 percent penetration rate, Asia is the most developed mobile phone market on the planet. “Everyone has a cell phone,” said Jerry Skurla, marketing director for developer platforms at NMS Communications, a provider of mobile technologies and packages. “They eat, sleep and breathe mobile. It’s like Star Trek.”
Playing to this market — 16-to-30-year-olds with disposable incomes and lifestyles oriented toward what’s cool, neat and immediate — NMS teemed with Contarra Systems and Grammy Thailand to provide fun-loving mobile services built on a speech-based system. And they did it in three months.
Hot & Faddish
Grammy Thailand, a creator of multimedia entertainment content for 20 million subscribers, had the idea and in a flash Contarra and NMS delivered the service. “It was a hot, faddish, consumer idea and we didn’t study it for a year,” Skurla said. The plan was to get it in operation, then tweak it.
Contarra’s speech-enabled system, built on NMS’ Open Access™ development platform, was deployed last June. NMS made all the mobile stuff work, while Contarra tailored its automatic speech recognition engine for the Thai language and environment.
Most major speech technology providers in the U.S. avoid the Asian market, Skurla said, because it’s so difficult. There are many languages and each language has many dialects. Thailand, in particular, was challenging. Contarra faced not only a complex language system but also an environment heavily influenced by background noise, video games, competing cell phone conversations and traffic. It designed a smarter application, Skurla said.
Karaoke Kraze
So, mobile karaoke. Who would have thought there was a need?
Apparently there are people who will use their cell phones to select a song from a menu (either by title or by singing into the phone), switch to speaker phone status, then sing along, either alone or with friends and loved ones.
There also appear to be romantic types who record their voices to background music, then have the system forward the songs to their latest heartthrobs using the service. All this singing goes for around $5 per call, Skurla estimated, dubbing mobile karaoke a higher-end service.
Asians with less cash to burn can hit up Grammy Thailand for a 50-cent horoscope or fortune. Dial in, the system asks questions and derives a personality profile from the verbal responses, then hands out a specialized fortune for the day. The system stores about 500 fortunes, and Skurla said prognostication over the phone is popular.
Cure for Lonely Hearts
And finally, there’s matchmaking — but forget about the challenge of writing an alluring profile and uploading a seductive photo. A lonely Grammy Thailand subscriber can speak his vital stats into his cell phone — being as sexy and provocative as he can — and hope that a potential partner will access his voice profile, listen to his glowing self promotion, then tell the system she’s interested. And they can do it while walking down the street.
A bonanza for pitchmen catering to impulse buyers.
“Mobile is a youth-oriented culture,” Skurla said. It’s a culture that wants everything now. “Mobile providers in Asia consider themselves consumer companies, not telecom companies.”
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