Ericsson and InterDigital join Hypervoice Consortium

MILWAUKEE, March 7, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The Hypervoice Consortium, officially announced at the WebRTC conference in November of last year, has now welcomed two new founding partners to the group, bringing the total to six. InterDigital and Ericsson join Telefonica Digital, HarQen, Voxeo Labs, and Martin Geddes Consulting Ltd. as industry leaders who have come together to redefine the future of voice services. The founding partners aim to fulfill the consortium's mission of articulating and advancing standards, capabilities and potential applications for the emerging Hypervoice framework.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130307/CG73186LOGO)

"It's finally time for voice to join in the hypermedia revolution," said Martin Geddes, co-founder of the Hypervoice Consortium.  "Hypervoice technology allows our spoken words to transcend the limits of the past and link what we say to what we do."

Hypervoice transforms voice communications into native web objects – fully searchable, shareable and linkable, as well as available in its original audio format. The framework covers all languages and accents, making voice conversations usable much like written words on a webpage but without suffering the challenges of speech to text.

A conference call or impromptu team meeting – when utilizing Hypervoice – can be a totally different experience.  Hypervoice conversations can be initiated from within any digital communication channel such as Facebook or Twitter, CRM systems or Instant Messenger, and natural behaviors like note taking, assigning tasks or sharing slides create metadata for the recorded audio. New behaviors, such as tagging the conversation with important information, enable new kinds of workflow. 

The collective metadata Hypervoice can enable brings new meaning and context for your conversations, making Hypervoice conversations as easily searchable and navigable as hypertext web pages. Hypervoice opens up an opportunity space for collaboration technologies today that are comparable to the arrival of hypertext and e-commerce in the 1990s.

As new founding partners of the Hypervoice Consortium, Ericsson and InterDigital bring unique perspectives of the Hypervoice model.  "Global communication challenges cannot be fixed by more of the same technology," noted Vish Nandlall, CTO of Ericsson North America. "Hypervoice opens up a new ecosystem for voice products and services."

Jim Nolan, InterDigital's Executive VP of Research & Development, takes another viewpoint. "There is an opportunity to develop new voice communications technologies, applications and standards for rich media voice as another rich application delivered over wireless broadband networks," said Nolan.

"Hypervoice is a game changer," said Jason Goecke, President & CEO of Voxeo Labs.  "The framework holds the promise to transform our expectations of voice, video, and even in-person conversations." 

Telefonica Digital, the earliest supporter of Hypervoice, has a vision of 'beyond connectivity' that complements the Hypervoice model.  "People still have the need to speak to each other, so voice services are important. And with Hypervoice it is no longer one-dimensional – voice becomes searchable, reusable assets. We see opportunities for Hypervoice, along with other communications channels, creating a new generation of services and apps that provide great user experiences, potentially beyond even in-person meetings," said Tracy Isacke, Head of Silicon Valley and Director Investments and Global Partnerships, Telefonica. "With WebRTC becoming a mature browser-based standard for online communication, Hypervoice becomes a realistic and attractive standard for voice communication."

About The Hypervoice Consortium
The mission of the Hypervoice Consortium is to bridge the gap between voice, the Web and telephony by providing a forum to further the development of standards, capabilities and applications and to cultivate the ecosystem of the larger Hypervoice market. The Hypervoice Consortium includes thought-leaders in web applications and platforms, voice technologies and telecom.

For more information on Hypervoice:
Web:  Hypervoice.org
Twitter:  #Hypervoice
A whitepaper titled "Hypertext to Hypervoice – Linking what we say to what we do", authored by Martin Geddes, is available at www.Hypervoice.org/whitepaper.

Trademarks
Hypervoice is a trademark of the Hypervoice Consortium LLC. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Contact:
Lindsay Seabrook
+1-608-520-0683
[email protected]

SOURCE Hypervoice Consortium