What is Voice 2.0?

Filed Under Cloud Telephony, Industry, Voice 2.0 | 1 Comment

Voice 2.0 is the combination of data, voice and video-over IP. All this traffic is starting to converge, and there are a lot of tools that can help you utilize them.

How Voice 2.0 has affected the industry

The telecom market has already seen massive changes in how it works. If you were watching things happen over the last 5 years, you would have seen that almost all phone systems work on the same Cat-5 cable that your data comes over. Wiring offices just became easier for everyone. What was the impact of this? Well, now we have to share bandwidth on the wire, and our network switches need to move more packets. At data centers, large VoIP systems can route traffic and handle media without expensive hardware to terminate T1 lines.

As networks get faster, it’s easier to start implementing Voice 2.0 services. Just look at the old days of choppy Yahoo and MSN Messenger calls, to today’s (somewhat better) Skype and Google Talk services! As things get faster, we’ll be adding video to the mix too!

How to use Voice 2.0

As a consumer, it’s easy. Just download Google Talk or Skype, use your cell phone, do what you always do – it’s already being implemented for you in the back end.

As a developer, it’s a bit harder. That’s what we’re going to start showing on this site! Take a look at this Voice Broadcast API. This is a quick way to start sending out voice messages. I’ll start posting some code soon so you can start using it in your applications. There are some more advanced topics, like mobilizing a distributed workforce, and the problems are becoming easier to solve! I’ve worked on a team that allowed 400 volunteers from all over the U.S. to call thousands of voters, just using their web browsers!

So, coming back to Voice 2.0, we’re ready to start the process. VoIP is probably in a better place than video right now. Here are some quick links while you are in the mood:

Voice XML
Voice Broadcast API
Distributed Telephony Architecture