Getting real about unified communications
As planning for the next wave of speech server technologies gets underway, I'll try to post more on the broader context of Unified Communications. I'd love to get your feedback on the communication scenarios, applications or features that you'd like to develop or use.
Kyle defines the field nicely in kicking off his blog Developing for Unified Communications:
There are a lot of ingredients in this soup. VoIP, Video, IM, Presence, Identity, Federation, Text to Speech, Speech to Text, Phones, Soft Phones, Applications, Services, IVR to name but a few. I don’t have the answers as to how all this will shake out over time. We are just at the beginning of the road and where this road will lead is open to a lot of possibilities and obstacles.
Main point - it's wide open. We think there are some very cool integrations visible at this point, but it feels like just a fraction of the potential. Have you ever been limited or frustrated by a device or modality? For example, not being able to answer a phone call while you're in a meeting, wanting to point at something during a telephone conference or live meeting, or simply interact with a person or a system by text rather than voice, or vice versa, or both? This kind of thing is a result of the decoupled nature of today's devices and modes. This kind of thing, and many more like it, could be fixed by apps on a more unified communications platform.
All ideas and comments welcome. And contact me offline if you prefer.
