Text alerts to proliferate

THE VOLUME of text alerts will increase dramatically if speech specialist, Nuance, has its way. Nuance's Lynda Kate Smith reckons her company's tools can reduce the time it takes to create a text 'campaign' from six weeks to two days.

Most handset owners are familiar with text alerts when they receive a message on arrival in a foreign country from their network operator. It reads something like 'dial 123 to get your voicemails'.

Nuance hopes to extend the scope of such text alerts massively. For example, if you use a web- or voice-based service to check in, then the airline's system will send you a text receipt confirming your seat reservation.

The company has bundled all the relevant technologies into a product it calls the Nuance Notification hub. It is merging its own technologies with capabilities derived from the recent acquisitions of both Viecore and Multi-vision.

The result is that sending a notification as a text message, as an email, or as a voice message becomes relatively straightforward.

Smith says all the regular templates – such as 'your account is now overdrawn' – are built-in. So, all an organisation needs to do is customise the system by dragging and dropping objects.

The key to text alerts' success will be encouraging mobile phone users to opt in to such services. You might opt to receive account balance information from your Bank but refuse to receive the latest promotions, for example.

In certain circumstances, you might want to opt for all three alerts simultaneously – if you are a City trader closely watching a share price, for example.

Ms Smith also let slip that its customer – Unwired Nation – is working on providing Ebay with a voice notification capability in addition to text alerts.

Currently, Nuance is working with a single source for its SMS capabilities – a company called Iloop. In order to reduce costs for customers, however, it may cut out the middleman and go directly to local SMS aggregators.

Whatever happens, your handsets is going to receive far more automated texts in the very near future. µ