I got a note from my good friend Pat Phelan, CEO at Cubic Telecom, yesterday afternoon while out running an errand about a new service called Twitterfone. You can see the press release down below. It isn't VoIP, but this is a really fascinating example of where voice services are heading.

Please bear in mind that I was out in mobile mode, with only my Blackberry, so all I'd actually seen initially was the flurry of chatter on Twitter about Twitterfone and the expected flurry of test posts as people try it out. Sheryl and I got invitations to join the beta, but weren't back at the office until last night to actually get that done. For those of you who follow me at all, you know I'm an avid Twitter user, and have been since it was Twttr, long before it caught the wave of popularity. Sheryl and I use Twitter as part of our work at Stardust Global Ventures, and it's an integral part of our daily life.

When I started using Twitter, it was SMS only, so it required a mobile phone to use. Now it seems to have come full circle, as Twitterfone enables people to use their mobile phone rather than the browser/ Huh? Yep/ The difference is that you can now phone in a message and have it post rather than key in an SMS text message. It also posts a short URL that links to your recorded audio.

Like a great many people, I use Twitter almost entirely via mobile on my Blackberry, and I like the raw simplicity of the SMS interface. I find many add-on tools make Twitter more complex and are something of a nuisance. The web interface enhancements seem to wipe out the simple elegance of Twitter with undue complexity. But adding voice to the mix is a very different enhancement and opens new vistas in human-to-network resource interaction.

I'm not sure the concept bedazzles me initially, but it's interesting. I've played with SpinVOX and Utterz in the past. Both can do a similar type of thing - variations on a theme. Both of those implementations work pretty poorly in my experience. Speech recognition software however is improving at a rapid rate and if Twitterfone can do speech to text conversion cleanly, there could be some real value. Given the global audience on Twitter, the language and pronunciation variations could prove challenging.

That challenge was on my mind while I out in mobile mode, only on my Blackberry. That's when I got this message via Twitter on my mobile -


To be fair, it's the only one of those I saw, but very few of the people I follow on Twitter are using Twitterfone so far. I know it's in invite-only beta mode, so I expect some glitches.

This morning I tried it out myself for the first time. Here's what Twitterfone posted. If you click the graphic, you can hear what I said.



Twitterfone did a reasonable, but not quite perfect job of speech-to-text conversion.

Given that both Twitter and Twitterfone are free services, and Twitter has proven time and again that it's not entirely reliable, they make an interesting match for social networking tools. Now it's pretty easy to make a phone call and post to Twitter. You can actually speak a three minute message and the beginning will post to Twitter (140 character limit). People who want to hear the whole message can click through on the web to do so. On my Blackberry, I can click through and read the transcribed text, but not play the audio.

Being able to post to Twitter via a phone call somewhat troubles me as much as it intrigues me. The stream of Twitter messages is filled with useless drivel as it is. I'm as guilty as the next of posting useless information that's only noise to the world at large. Now we all have an easier way to post as we drive or are otherwise occupied. That's a mixed blessing.

I know two of the founding investors, both friends I think highly of. I'm really curious what their long range plans are. Is this for publicity or do they envision a monetization scheme that enables monetization. So far Twitter doesn't have any monetization mechanism, so now we have another free service enhancing a free service. I'm not sure where the survivability might be. It seems potentially rather tenuous. But Pat and Florian are very bright guys with a great handle on the business, so I'm interested in what their vision is.

Pat and Florian, how about a podcast briefing on here?

Twitterfone inaugurates voice-to-Twitter service

• Allows anyone to send updates to Twitter by calling a number
• Voice is automatically transcribed to text

Twitterfone www.twitterfone.com - an Internationally backed voice to text message service launched today in the US, UK and Ireland.

Twitterfone voice-enables Twitter, a text message rebroadcast service and the hottest social networking service at the moment. With Twitterfone, people can dictate text messages via their mobile to be sent out to everyone on their Twitter social network.

Twitterfone investor and Cubic Telecom President Pat Phelan stated "Right now the million active users of Twitter use cell phones or computers to send and receive short bursts of texts to each other. Millions of messages each day are sent like this but while Twitter is one of the truly mobile social networks out there, there are times when users on the move cannot stop what they are doing to key in a message.

Twitterfone improves upon Twitter by allowing us to make a voice call which is turned into text and sent out to our network of friends. This only costs the price of a local call, no matter how many it is sent to. With hands-free kits common in cars it now means we can text each other without taking our eyes off the road and our hands off the wheel."

How Twitter works:
Once people sign up to Twitter, they can subscribe to receive updates of users and receive them via the web or a text message. Web gurus Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble have over 20,000 subscribers each and even the Los Angeles Fire Department and the English Government are now sending out text updates to people via their Twitter account.

An alliance of international high-tech and telecom companies provide the technology platform behind Twitterfone. Geneva-based VOX telecom provides calls routing, Redwood City, California-based Zong powers mobile enrollment and transactions, MAXroam powers the telephony intelligence system and Dublin firm Dial2Do supplies the core speech recognition which is at the heart of Twitterfone. Dial2Do CEO Ivan MacDonald stated

"We've been involved in the space where the phone system meets the web for a long time now, and naturally we've been fascinated by the rise of Twitter. Increasingly, we'll see "web 2.0" services that people use primarily from their phones. Projections are that mobiles will become the dominant way of accessing the Internet, and a lot of this will be done via voice interfaces. We are very pleased to see Dial2Do add even more value to an already extraordinary service."

Phelan added "We built this because we are all avid users of Twitter and have made some excellent business connections and friendships from it. We decided to see what we could contribute to the service and with our telecoms backgrounds the Twitterfone idea fitted perfectly".

Twitterfone is in invite beta at the moment meaning that only those that have been sent invites can join up. There will be regular releases of invites and Twitterfone says they have planned for a million sign-ups over the next year.

Twitterfone inc is a privately owned corporation

Twitterfone investors are Pat Phelan, David Marcus, Florian Seroussi, Sean O Sullivan and Ivan MacDonald.