Is Voice dead or just undergoing a transformation?

Om Malik recently wrote a blog post entitled "Voice Is Dead or Long Live Voice?" and discussed how voice is becoming free and just an application on the network. Om points out two recent developments of Verizon allowing Google Voice over its 3G network and that AT&T will also allow Skype over its 3G network. Both of these highlight that voice is becoming an application and it doesn't matter how it's encoded, it will ultimately be transported across the network as IP.

Om goes on to link to Andy Abramson's post "Voice 3.0: The Era of API Calling"  which talks about one of Andy's client's "which has grasped the power of voice APIs and made them available to just about everyone"

As a result of old voice finally dying and Voice is transforming itself into Voice 3.0 and the era of the API, we'll see an explosion in Voice. Voice isn't integrated into our tools, our productivity suites, deeply enough into our contact centers so there's massive opportunity with Voice.

Martin Geddes of BT recently stated in an interview for BT's Innovation website;

"Yet voice calls are set to be an area of substantial growth. There's a huge opportunity to integrate voice into our personal productivity tools to help us, as individuals, to organise our time better. What we need is access to tools that provide us with the means to tell us what conversations we should be having with whom and when. These tools will ensure that we can reach the right person at the right time by meshing voice information with e-mail, text messaging and other communications."

As a result of this growth and the opportunities in this area, I hope to highlight a few of projects Orange is working on over the next few weeks. One of the first points of call is Orange's API website.