Yap and Cincinnati Bell Inc. -- Real World Solutions

By Stephanie Jordan
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With headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio, Cincinnati Bell provides integrated communications solutions including local, long distance, data, Internet, wireless and entertainment services. In addition, businesses ranging from start-up to large enterprises turn to Cincinnati Bell for efficient, scalable office communications systems, as well as complex information technology solutions including data center and managed services. Last month, Yap, a provider of fully automated voicemail-to-text services, announced that it had been selected to power Cincinnati Bell’s Voice2Text service for wireless customers. The service uses state-of-the-art speech recognition technology to convert incoming voicemails into text and then deliver the messages to the customer’s mobile phone as a SMS text Yap message. Customers can also opt to have transcriptions delivered to an email address.

“Cincinnati Bell subscribers have always been early adopters of advanced services, such as voicemail-to-text,” states Mike Vanderwoude, general manager of Cincinnati Bell Wireless. “By partnering with Yap, we are taking Voice2Text to the next level with enhanced options including email delivery of voicemail messages, a profanity filter, and online account management.”

The company says the Voice2Text service enhances productivity, since a customer can reply to a voicemail without having to dial in and listen to a message. In addition, messages are more manageable since they can be stored, indexed or forwarded.

“Today’s mobile subscribers expect to interact with their voicemails as efficiently as they do when accessing other messaging services on the go,” says Dr. Shiv Bakhshi, principal analyst and founder of Mobile Perspectives, a consultancy focused on the wireless and mobile communications industry. “By pushing voicemails to the edge device, carriers can also realize the potential savings associated with significantly reduced demand on centralized voicemail access and storage.”

 

Published November 9, 2009