Talking to me?

The telecoms industry is great at inventing technologies, worse at making them useful to a great number of people. Which data services have been really taking off in recent years? In Europe it's SMS, Korea/Japan it's email and in Japan it's also iMode with pictures. And in the US it's to some degree Push-To-Talk, PTT.



Since I'm from Europe I know most about how the SMS industry works. One way of paying for services and content is through premium SMS. You send an SMS to a premium number and get some kind of service in return like a ring tone or similar. In the background invisible for the average end-customer, the SMS is sent from the operator to a system hosted by the content supplier. It handles the SMS and sends back the content as an SMS, MMS or WAP Push.



This is usable to some degree, but still not good enough according to my experience. Older people, disabled, kids, people not used to SMS, etc have problems using it. So why not talk to the system instead? In PTT there are generic channels an operator could configure for different usages like ring tones, weather, sport results, stocks, etc. When you want to use one of these services you simple select that channel och say what you want to do. The system responds with a voice message through the same channel. Simple, usable, not much can go wrong and cheap!



So what is needed in order to realize talking to your customers and they talking to you? Not much actually :-)

• Enable a couple of public channels in the PTT server hosted by the operator


• Write an application using the ParlayX messaging API


• Write a BEA WebLogic Network Gatekeeper, WLNG, plug-in for PTT using the Extension SDK


• Start market the service to your customers!

Now since it is working and your customers can select a public PTT channel on their handset and talk to you. You send back a confirmation and the requested information as voice or through SMS/WAP Push. How does this work?

The PTT plug-in in WLNG works as a PTT client receiving the PTT INVITE message. It redirects it to a media server that receives the voice from the end-user. The voice stream is transferred into voice XML and sent to WLNG. WLNG sends it as any message to the third party application using the ParlayX messaging interface. The application receives the message as text (as in any SMS) and handles it as today when receiving an SMS. The application sends back a confirmation or the result as text. WLNG sends the text to the media server as voice XML and the media server transforms it to voice and sends the voice on the PTT channel back to the user. If it was just a confirmation, then the application uses the normal mechanism to deliver the content to the end-user. Done! Not too complicated, huh?



Since you are a smart guy, you are wondering which services can I build using this technology? What about a weather service? WLNG combines the call with a location call and the generated weather report is read to you by the media server. Another service could be latest stock price, timetables, eBay, Google Map trip instructions read to you, and much more. It's up to your fantasy ...