The RebelVox Blog » Thinking about Communications

RebelVox as the “Ultimate Solution”—we didn’t say it.

By Mary Panttaja on June 12, 2009 – 10:12 am

Brough Turner, Chief Strategy Officer of Dialogic, wrote a great post about the evolution of voice, presence, and telephony. He brings up several points that are core to our approach.

Despite more than a decade of development, VoIP services today are little different than traditional telephony as practiced for a century. Yes, we’ve decorated the original service with voicemail, email notifications and phonebook auto-dialing, but the fundamental service remains the same. You place a call, you wait to be connected and then you find out if the other person is available and willing to talk.

But we were reallly pleased to be included in his closing paragraph, where he begins to imagine what voice could be.

The ultimate solution should seamlessly transition between asynchronous voice messaging, push-to-talk and one-on-one live conversation as desired. Recently Rebelvox demonstrated how this might work (although as I write this there is no product or service available). Like Palringo, an instant messaging interface lets you see if your correspondent is available. A push-to-talk button lets you send them an asynchronous voice message. You each can see a history of your messages, voice or text, in an IM format display. But here’s the breakthrough: If you see a message coming in live, and you choose to, a single click lets you listen in catchup mode (silences dropped) and, once you are caught up, seamlessly connects you in a traditional voice telephone call. Now that’s Telephony N.0!

This isn’t everything that we at RebelVox believe voice can be. We want it to be full-duplex live, totally reliable like email, instant like PTT or IM, multi-modal, trivially multi-party, and seamlessly live and messaged. Everybody gets precisely what they want all the time.

eComm Europe : Amsterdam Fall 2009

By Mary Panttaja on June 3, 2009 – 11:01 am

Published in Future Communications

RebelVox had its coming out event at eComm2009 in San Francisco, California, our home base. We are happy to see that the eComm adventure continues this year with the announcement of an eComm Conference in Amsterdam in October.

We have attended both eComm conferences, 2008 in stealth mode and 2009 where we presented some of our ideas about voice communications. We believe in the mission of eComm, which is to explore those edges where traditional telecommunications meets the software and internet worlds; where the radical transformation of experience that is engendered by software is challenging our sense of what communications are all about.

We will be supporting this event and working to participate in the ongoing conversation driven by Lee Dryburgh’s inspired leadership. If you want to be in on the conversation and see what radical new innovations are coming down the pipe, Amsterdam is a good place to be in October.

What is “rendezvous?”

By Mary Panttaja on May 21, 2009 – 11:07 am

Published in Enriched Conversations, Human Efficiency

One of the fascinating features of RebelVox is a “perfect rendezvous”. But when we try to explain that to folks, it seems a mysterious term of unrecognizable value. So we always struggle with how to effectively explain.

The classic rendezvous problem is illustrated with the separate systems that support live voice and voice mail. (That they are separate systems is the key to the problem.) It shows up particularly on mobile interactions, partly because on my mobile I can see who is calling me. So you call me, but I don’t get to it before it “rolls over” into the voice mail system. I can see it was you, so I dial you. But you are talking to my voice mail system, and, sure enough, I am rolled into your voice mail system. Because they are different systems, my trying to reach you while you are leaving a message is impossible. AND, I cannot listen while you are creating the message; that stream is no where that I can interact with it until you complete it and I “go and get it.” Live calls and voice mail are different applications that “land” in different places.

I often like to extend this rendezvous context beyond the complexities of live voice and voice mail to consider where my instant messaging, emails, conference calls, and video chats live. All in different applications (managed by different protocols). No wonder we are overwhelmed. Who wants to check all of those different pipes of information for the response to a simple IM I sent? This constrains users to a few applications and to modalities that can maximize the likelihood that my response won’t get lost. If you email, I email you back, even if I’d rather speak. If I leave you a voice mail….well, there is no good way to figure out how to rendezvous with voice mail.

How did this happen? Well, first we had live voice over circuits. Then we tacked on a voice mail system that diverts the connection to a voice mail server. Two systems. Then we found that texting was cool. Another system. Then, from another software and service model, comes email. Great for asynchronous messaging. But another system. Video chat? Another system. Some of these are associated on the desktop in common applications, but they are still separate media paths, and what we would call separate conversations, because, at the core, they can never rendezvous. (On the surface they can sometimes be “forced” into a common stack of messages, but because these various platforms do not share the conversational context, they can’t actually rendezvous.)

What if I could respond to any message received in any media you choose to use with any medium I choose, and they would always rendezvous in the same conversation, the one you and I (or you and I and any number of people) have ongoing? And what if live voice and messaged voice (time shifted voice mails, if you like) also rendezvous in the same single place?

RebelVox supports this very thing. (Of course, that’s why I’m writing the post…)

The RebelVox protocol is totally indifferent to the type of media being transported, that is, we can support any media. We support conversations in which the user always gets to choose, at any given moment, what medium to use—always with the same application and the same messaging context. Except for latency optimization, the protocol doesn’t process live full-duplex voice any differently than voice messages or video streams or text or transcriptions of other streams (”derived streams”). It’s all the same in RebelVox. So any given “conversation” or thread can contain any or all media types totally interwoven. Each participant gets to contribute however they want an any given moment—but it all ends up in the right conversation; so no missed messages. And it really transforms multi-party conversations where anyone can be live at any time they want; but some can choose not to be live, but they’ll never miss any of it. Everyone gets to choose their favorite way and time to interact but are guaranteed that nothing is lost.

The whole rendezvous solution is summed up in the unique RebelVox interaction we call “catch up to live”. CTL enables you to join a live ongoing conversation, message, call, or conference, play it slightly faster if you want, and seamlessly transition into the live call, having missed nothing. You are leaving me a message, I notice, and I “catch up to live”, and then we are on a live call, but I heard it all.

Think about how that transforms the dropped call (just keep talking), the missed rendezvous, or the multliple conference calls that you can’t quite ever get to. Ever consider how cool it would be to pause any live conversation and then slip back in seamlessly without having missing anything?

It’s all about the rendezvous.

Mention in Speech Technology 2009

By Mary Panttaja on May 18, 2009 – 10:52 am

Published in Future Communications, It's About Time

We were pleased to see an article by Moshe Yudkowsky in Speech Technology Magazine about the RebelVox solution. It’s fun to hear the product described as “riveting”.

In March, I went to the Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) in San Francisco. There, a San Francisco-based voice communications platform vendor named RebelVox gave a riveting demonstration of a telephony interface that eliminates almost all of the overhead of making a telephone call. The company separates the act of sending your voice from making a connection, both of which are no longer bound in a rigid, linear time sequence. As a user, I select the name of the person I want to call from a list in what appears to be a standard instant messaging client. The application brings up a history of all of my calls and text and voice messages in typical IM format. I then touch the talk button and start to speak: My voice message transfers immediately to the person I’m calling.

Army Uses the iPod Touch

By Mary Panttaja on May 5, 2009 – 1:12 pm

Published in Human Efficiency

An interesting article showed up in Newsweek this month about iPods being used by soldiers in the field (in particular the iPod Touch). And they are not being used to just play music, though that probably happens too, but to run critical applications. As commercial products, those you and I use everyday, get more powerful, they approach capabilities originally embedded in much more expensive devices. And not only are the devices cheaper, they are essentially more powerful and quite a bit more flexible.

Using a commercial product for such a crucial military role is a break from the past. Compared with devices built to military specifications, iPods are cheap. Apple, after all, has already done the research and manufacturing without taxpayer money. The iPod Touch retails for under $230, whereas a device made specifically for the military can cost far more.

In fact, today at Amazon the low-end 8 megabyte iPod Touch is $218.85 with free two-day shipping.

The trend to cheaper, faster, and more powerful consumer products, has been fueling a revolutionary change for the military, enabling them to adopt commercial products and leverage them for their needs. Traditionally every item was purpose-built to meet special requirements—mostly because we did not have commercial products that came anywhere close. But now commercial products surpass many military specifications and with drastically lower costs.

There is also the fact that we are solving problems (as noted in the article: translations, research, data collection and sharing) with software instead of hardware. Software is always cheaper. But who would have thought that the computer of choice for running these software applications would be an iPod—originally conceived to play music and videos.

Once you have a computer in your hand, no matter it’s small size and cost, many, many things are possible.

New User Experience for Voice

By Dan S. on April 27, 2009 – 10:21 am

Published in Future Communications

Visuals from the presentation our Vice President of Technology Matt Ranney gave at eComm 2009 have been posted online (see the slides below to follow along with the video):

and

Matt Ranney's Presentation at eComm 2009

View more presentations from eCommConf.

Thanks to Lee S Dryburgh at eComm.

What in the world is a “phone”?

By Mary Panttaja on April 22, 2009 – 10:54 am

Published in Future Communications, Telephony

First there is the telephone, which is something that sits on a table or desk. Then there is the mobile phone (cell phone), which is something you can carry around with you. They both allow you to make “calls”. So what is the “phone” part? It is a device that has connectivity to the PSTN (public switched telephone network) and, when it makes a connection to another device, enables you to talk to that device live. (Now the device might be another phone, or it might be the voice mail system, or an answering machine.) There are some other twiddly-bits to a phone, but that is the basic idea. VoIP systems can bypass the PSTN sometimes when they run on the internet only, but otherwise work pretty much like phones. (VoIP does create streams of packets, but does it in such a way as to create a virtual circuit and connect you live to your destination (in order to be just like a phone.))

We have historically delivered this functionality with specialized devices that are dedicated to this task. Even modern smart phones, which do a lot of other things like take pictures and run web applications, have a special part of the device that is still just a phone with historic phone behaviors (create a circuit to another device and allow a live call to take place.) We’ve added on more stuff, but left the phone function just as it has always been.

Of course, we know that what we really want is to talk to someone and have our speech delivered to that someone. Sometimes we’d like it to be live so we can talk together; and sometimes we don’t care about live. And now we have a device called a computer which, low and behold, can capture voice and deliver to others. It also has great advantages in that you can actually write applications which enable us to process the voice in other ways—not just live delivery which is all the phones do.

So why do we need phones? We don’t; or, more correctly, we won’t. We won’t need a specialized device. Basically, phones are an historic artifact from the days when we didn’t have computers. And they won’t go away immediately because they have an enormous infrastructure (think companies and network and hardware) that has yet to be re-purposed—that infrastructure can only manage a phone just the way it is currently conceived.

But it is all changing. The evolution is coming from both directions. Mobile phones are getting to be computers. And computers are getting to be so small and mobile that they are indistinguishable from phones. And networks are becoming more and more general purpose pipes to move our data and our voices.

So, without an enormous bout of innovation, what we think of as a phone is going to be obsolete. Not tomorrow, and not next year, but eventually. Eventually we will use computers of all sizes (like telephones and mobile phones today) and of varying degrees of mobility. They will come from what we think of now as phone manufacturers, but will also come from traditional and newly modeled computer manufacturers.

The really good news is that we’ll finally get some more sophisticated applications that will serve us better by saving wasted time, doing things when and how we want, and connecting us seamlessly to anyone in the world.

But it will no longer be a phone.

PS. You may think of your iPhone or your Blackberry as a general purpose device. But really they both embody two devices. One is the regular old phone system; and one is a multi-purpose computer. And so far, the power of the computer has not been unleashed for the “phone call” usage. Now you have a device that is a phone and a computer, but eventually you’ll be able to lose the “phone”.

1 conversation: 7 minutes to 1 minute. What did we lose?

By Mary Panttaja on April 15, 2009 – 4:54 pm

Published in It's About Time

We have a video on our site that illustrates how RebelVox can work in the consumer or enterprise space. You get to feel how the messaging, live conversations, and the transition between those states actually works.

We estimate that the conversation shown, which includes leaving messages as well as a live conversation, would take about 7 minutes of the participant’s time to complete if they were using standard telelphony and voice mail. The participants, Sam and Jill, only speak for about 1 minute, which is about how long it takes to complete with RebelVox.

What’s missing?

Time waiting for a circuit to be created.
Time waiting for phones to ring.
Time waiting for someone to answer, or worst yet, not answer.
Time listening to voice mail prompts, only some of which come from your conversational partner. Most of them come unbidden from the carrier.
Time dialing into your voice mail to pick up messages—-and all of the above lost time.
Repeat ad infinitum.

Issues that contribute to the problem:

Most calls are not completed to their targets; a high percentage end up in voicemail. This is time-expensive for both the sender and receiver.
How long are most messages you leave? Many of them are very short. How does the overhead (waiting, ringing, prompts) measure up against the actual thing you need to say?
How many times a day does the average worker have to leave or pick up a message? Multiply that times how many people have voice mail?

This is not an insignificant piece of the gross national time bank—this is our precious time lost for no good purpose at all. The older generations seem so used to losing this time that they don’t even notice it. Younger generations, who have grown up with chat clients, not so much. They increasingly don’t use voicemail if they can help it. Unfortunately, they also give up on live voice, because, with this archaic model, it is so time consuming and far from the instant gratification they expect. Voice itself is actually quick and efficient, but the circuit switched technology overhead slows us down.

We think time savings is a good thing—and our goal is to generate a lot of it, for everyone.

RebelVox on TechCrunch

By Mary Panttaja on March 30, 2009 – 7:23 am

Published in Future Communications, Human Efficiency

Friday RebelVox got noticed on TechCrunch—with just a brief note about what we do. In addition, the day was an internal anniversary of sorts; so a special day all around.

The TechCrunch post illustrates a few of the challenges we face in trying to communicate about our core functionality and how it affects communication applications. Every analogy we use falls short–email is close in one regard; but then our protocol provides live voice. Voice messaging comes close but then we support asynchronous (and synchronous, for that matter) text. Push-to-talk is interesting—but we support an infinite degree of time shifting.

So how are we like email?

You get to talk or listen whether you have good network or not, in the same way you can do email on an airplane.
At the moment you talk, the other participants don’t have to be paying attention; and you never interrupt them.
You can get all your voice on any and every device anywhere, because it lives in the cloud.
You can save whatever voice conversations you want, just like email.
You can listen, review, replay, respond any time you want.
When RebelVox is integrated into the email infrastructure, you can can use email addresses for voice instead of phone numbers.

How are we like push to talk?

You can talk instantly. (But with RebelVox it doesn’t have to blare out the other’s speakers until they want it.)
You save time because there is no setup network time (no ringing, no messages, no prompts). Choose! Talk! Done! A five second message takes five seconds.
You can have preset conversations with any number of people—think of them as channels that do not have to be live. But can be live with anyone, whenever they want.

How are we like voice mail?

Well, we never like to compare ourselves to voice mail, but….
You can leave messages and listen to time shifted messages; but they are stored in meaningful contexts and can be among multiple parties.
And, did I mention that with RebelVox they can be live? (As in screening calls, playing faster, catching up to live.)

How are we totally unique?

Live voice, voice messaging (time shifted voice), text, location, and video all rendezvous in the same conversations, protocol, and applications. Nothing has to be unified because it is all one.
Only a RebelVox application or protocol enables you to seamlessly transition between live voice and time shifted voice, either direction, at the whim of how people use the system moment to moment.
Voice messages can transition into live calls and users can screen calls, play them faster, and catch up to live on a call with one party or many (including conference calls).
No other voice system that support live calls also extends the range of a challenged network by gracefully dealing with bandwidth shortfalls and extending voice when no live voice can take place. (We freely admit that we cannot manufacture bits where no bits are to be had.)
Only RebelVox persists all voice and once we’ve persisted conversations and their media, live voice becomes data and applications can be built to use voice in many meaningful ways: embedded in applications, voice as a media of record, transcriptions, translations, after action reviews, and other kinds of search, filters, and restructuring.

Only Rebelvox incorporates all the functionality of email, live voice, voice messaging, and text messaging together in one application and gives perfect control to both the sender and receiver over how they want to interact with their communications.

Between a Rock and a Very Hard Place

By Mary Panttaja on March 27, 2009 – 6:06 am

Published in Human Efficiency, Transforming Radios, Weak Spots in Tactical Communication Scenarios

Some of the prime motivating factors for our work at RebelVox are stories of people caught without effective communications at a critical moment.

One story is of a team under fire in Afghanistan whose communication specialist cannot get enough radio connectivity to call for help from his point of safety. (The actual Rock.) He has to move out into the open, key his mic, and speak his request, which, of course, puts him in harms way for an extended period of time. He makes the call but is fatally wounded. (This is real story from Afghanistan: news story from the NY Daily News; the official Medal of Honor Page.) In fact, our CEO spent most of 2002 and 2003 on a Special Forces team in the same area where this event took place.

Another is a fire fighter deep in a building skirting around a large air conditioner (or some such) when the call to “get out of the building” comes. She misses it. And no one knows that she misses it. And she never knows that she missed anything.

A firefighting team in California is moving around the back side of fast moving fire through rough and hilly terrain. The plan is to skirt east around the edge of the fire. As they drop into a ravine, the radio call to tell them that the fire has shifted east, and that they should go west, never comes through their speakers.

One key problem in these situations is that our current model for radio functionality (how the comms application works) is that it is live or nothing. If there is not enough bandwidth for the radios to process the media (for both the sender and the receiver) at the moment the words are spoken, then there is no communication.

If the communications could be live but were not required to be live (if the technology in the radios and the network supported this), then, if the connectivity existed but did not meet the very high quality required for live, the communications could come through more slowly (but get there). Then the creation of the message and the use of radio spectrum would not have to happen at the same time: the radio, not the person, might have to get out into the open. Senders could know whether receivers got the message.

We hope and plan to fix these problems with tactical radios (and telephones, for that matter).The results of our solution enables us to change a lot of other things about how radio and telephone communications work. But these stories continue to be a inspiration for us. Get us into the office each day.

PS. For an explanation of what we call the “tyranny of live”–check out this post.