Voice-powered Mobile Local Search

Mike Boland (Kelsey Group) has a nice write-up on voice-enable search at SearchEngineWatch. He reviews Vlingo, Tellme, Google and Sensory, Inc.

Voice search could have a bright future in mobile, and even evolve beyond the phone itself. For example, an area known as speech controlled Internet devices (SCIDs) transforms the myriad electronics that surround into their own little search engines.

Sensory Inc. is working on this proposition. It's spent the past 15 years embedded speech recognition chips in about 60 million products -- everything from in-car voice command systems to Bluetooth headsets, to voice controlled toys.

... http://searchenginewatch.com/3634640

Continental Airlines launches Alex the Virtual Expert

Continental Airlines just launched Alex, a Virtual Expert. Type a question, she answers and provides the search results. Its really awesome and a glimpse of what's to come in search. A voice-powered version will follow (mobile, IVR). I also like the use of Virtual Expert rather than Virtual Agent.

Check her out on the Continental web site

The technology is powered by Next IT Corporation. Here's their summary:

Next IT’s Human Emulation Software, ActiveAgent, creates Virtual Experts that are redefining the communication between people and technology. ActiveAgent, accurately understands and interprets natural language questions and delivers exact results across multiple service channels such as the Web, contact center, intranet, mobile devices, and more. For more information on Next IT and its customers, please email info@nextit.com or visit www.NextIT.com.

Bing to Power Yahoo Search - First of Many Deals?

The Yahoo / Microsoft deal was announced this morning. I wonder if we will see more of these deals from msoft? With a Bing-powered back-end, yellow pages publishers such as Idearc and RHD, or newspapers could focus on sales and marketing. The cost of maintaining a competitive, independent local property / IYP is too great, and dooms the publisher to mediocrity and/or losses. Outsourcing the back-end and operations would enable many publishers to remain competitive and reduce costs. These deals would make sense, but is msoft likely to try to integrate more than one partner? I hope we see msoft make this a strategic imperative and aggressively recruit media partners.

From GigaOM: iPhone’s Voice Control

"Is iPhone’s Voice Control the Sound of Things to Come?"

Yes, and not just mobile devices, voice control (voice search, voice portals) will be prolific. There is a convergence of technology, cost, and usage. Microphones and speakers are cheap, bandwidth is easy and voice applications are up to the task. There will be voice control at retail ("tell me the specs of the new Sony flat screen"); voice portals built into vending machines; at tourist attractions - everywhere that a kiosk with a touch screen is cost prohibitive or otherwise inaccessible.

From GigaOM: "Apparently, Apple believes that speech recognition is the sound of things to come for mobile devices and applications. Apple’s attention is a welcome development, and will undoubtedly accelerate the shift that began with the success of Goog411, Vlingo and other speech-enabled mobile apps. Despite the fact that mobile devices are well-suited for speech recognition — they do, after all, have microphones already built in — no OEM or operator to date has delivered a speech solution that is easy to use, much less promoted the feature to users as a key distinction. Apple is changing that, and other device makers and mobile operators that fail to keep up will be left behind in the competition for users who value simpler, more intuitive UIs."

The Rise of Proactive Customer Care

Great review of voice applications driving customer benefit:

"With the emergence of the proactive customer care market, IVRs are providing additional strategic benefits, as they are making major contributions to revenue generation and are helping to provide an outstanding customer experience".

Presented By: Donna Fluss, DMG Consulting LLC

Improved Customer Service will Drive Mobile Local Search

Over at Screenwerk Greg Sterling just asked “Will Local Market Ultimately Reject PFP/PPC”

Calls are a difficult deliverable for many SMBs. As Greg previously wrote when FastCall411 launched, consumers expect immediate availability when hiring a local merchant.

Problem is merchants don’t always answer their phones or are not available and don’t want to be billed for leads they can not fulfill. In this case not only is the call not billable when the plumber “is under the sink” and not available when the consumer needs them, but the consumer has not been able to make a decision in hiring a plumber.

Until we can better match consumer demand with merchant supply – PPCall pricing will be discounted and margins for calls will be lower than clicks.

We must look beyond call tracking as merely a means to prove ROI. Voice applications can help improve the consumer experience by matching ready to buy consumers dynamically with ready to sell merchants. For PPCall to work, the focus must be on merchants who best serve their consumers, rather than the highest bid for calls.

For example, knowing a consumer is looking for a 2001 Honda Civic (based on the call), TryAnother - our call routing application - offers a redirection to a 2nd seller if the first car is sold, or if the caller wants to keep shopping after the first call. The consumer can also review the interaction with the seller right from within the call. These types of voice applications will help fix PPCall leakage, SMB churn and, in my opinion, will drive mobile local search.

So I respectfully I disagree with Greg’s statement regarding PPCall:

But there’s another (radical) performance scenario in the mix too: YP publishers simply selling calls derived from whatever source (print, online, mobile). This product is being tested right now in certain markets. That makes the traffic sources more of a black box and the publisher manages the delivery of leads or calls from any/all of them. It also means that under certain circumstances “organic” calls can potentially be counted as well (ethical caveats here). This has the advantage of no required education and no analytics to understand, pay attention to or optimize against.

I believe there is significant opportunity for innovation in analyzing the interaction between calling consumers and merchants. As I written here before, I also suspect that Google with the relaunch of Google Voice, and Skype are headed in this direction.

Yellow Pages: How to Increase Leads 1000%

Telmetrics released very interesting results of a *tracking URL* study they conducted from November 2008 to April 2009 with 1200 print Yellow Pages ads. Telmetrics is a long time vendor in the call measurement space. Though several entrants crowded the call tracking market a few years ago - namely VoiceStar, eStara, Ingenio, CallSource, StandardCall and others – Telmetrics has remained independent and reemerged as the leader in the space. I commend the innovation in offering Yellow Page publishers another tool to prove ROI to their local advertisers.

The Telmetrics press release states "Tracking unique URL activity and call measurement reflects a 78 percent increase in leads driven by print Yellow Pages."

I asked Bill Dinan, the new CEO, if leads delivered to the advertiser increased 78% or just the total tracked leads vs tracked calls alone. I assume the leads were previously delivered, just not tracked with a unique URL. The difference is semantic, however. A lead not tracked is basically a lead not delivered in the eyes of the advertiser.

It’s interesting to think about lead quality in this scenario. Is a phone lead 10 or 15 seconds? What constitutes a web lead in a URL tracking study? Do the analytics eliminate referral (search) traffic and only report leads resulting from the print ads? Is a unique web user a lead (impressions)? Or is a web result a lead (email, call, printed coupon)? Without these definitions its hard to make a "call vs web lead" analysis apples to apples.

The Yellow Pages industry needs to fix their leaking bucket, but I am not sure URL tracking is scalable. It’s an interesting offer for a few existing advertisers, and can be used to extrapolate estimates of online leads referred by the print ads. Offering existing call tracking advertisers URL tracking provides deeper reporting to a smaller group of advertisers. Alternatively, and far more effective in my opinion, Yellow Pages publishers, such as AT&T, RHD and Idearc could provide lead reporting to far more advertisers.

If and when the Yellow Pages industry gets serious about saving itself, they will need to prove ROI to many more advertisers. Call tracking usage will have to increase at a multiple of 10X (at a minimum) and either the vendors (such as Telmetrics) or the publishers themselves will need to innovate to insure that quality leads are delivered to merchants and that consumer benefit increases.

Call tracking and voice applications can improve the consumer experience and better match the consumer demand with merchant supply. Publishers will need to embrace voice applications to realize the many benefits of integrating this technology into mobile local search.

If a publisher were increase call tracking usage 10X, they could report that lead delivery increased nearly 1000%.

That’s a headline.

AdQuant: Google’s Top 100 Search Advertisers

I just reviewed AdQuant’s reporting of Google’s top 100 search advertisers in April 2009 (by daily PPC ad spend):

* AOL represented nearly 5% of April PPC ad spend for Google (up significantly from March)
* Credit / credit repair / refi represented 43 of the top 100 at just under 20% of the PPC top 100 ad spend
* E-commerce represented 22 PPC advertisers and 24% of the top 100 daily PPC spend
* 19 travel-related PPC advertisers accounted for 21% of the top 100
* 18 insurance-related advertisers (14%)
* The remaining 20% were broadly search (Edmunds and GM.com were the only 2 automotive sites listed)

It is interesting that 43 credit / refi advertisers are still spending just under $1 million per day.

InfoUSA verifying local listings. Has this business model lost its legs?

Mike Blumenthal writes a blog on Google Maps and Yahoo Local Search. This morning he blogged on a verification call received from InfoUSA, and commented that they didn’t collect very much data on the brief call (no hours of operation, business function, ect)

I am curious how merchants would feel if InfoUSA used an automated call, but asked more questions? Better or worse than a live a operator? In addition to the data InfoUSA didn’t collect on the call to Mike, its interesting that they don't seem to use the data from their call disposition logs. A disconnected number is most likely out-of-business, but what does a no answer, busy and/or IVR / voice mail tell us?

FastCall411 research indicates that to 87% of users *availability* is an important factor when choosing a local merchant. Answering the phone and responding to a consumer call is a measure of availability. Undoubtedly important data that InfoUSA is either not collecting, or not licensing to their clients.

Last , a company frequently in the mobile local search news, MerchantCircle, has verified a ton a local merchants using a very different approach to InfoUSA (and with a different biz model). The calls are automated, but the merchant has a chance to add as much details to a MerchantCircle page as they wish. I think MerchantCirlce has the better model as I can’t see the data aggregation companies like InfoUSA maintaining their model.

Is Time Running Out for Newspapers and Yellow Pages?

As an early Tivo adopter, I shifted my television habits several years ago. I am now watching the current season of 24 on Hulu and I noticed that Idearc has been running ads for Super Guarantee.

Idearc, now the 2nd largest yellow pages publisher (US), launched Super Guarantee to offer consumers limited assurance against poor service delivered by Idearc advertisers. I assume that Idearc research indicated that consumers are wary of merchants and that the guarantee would help more consumers use their yellow pages – print and online. I applaud the focus on the consumer and think it’s a nice differentiator for Idearc. They’ve also picked up some good press off of the program.

But the program does beg the question: where’s the guarantee for the merchant? Idearc research (and experience) must similarly indicate that merchants want a return on their advertising investment. Also, I wonder if the program hints that merchants offer sub-par service and that consumers need Idearc to step in and police their interactions with advertisers. Sure, merchants want more consumer leads – and would prefer to have a guarantee on their ad spend – but does the program portray merchants negatively? Given this potential, why didn’t Idearc roll out a merchant focused program at the same time? Call it “Super Accountability”? It would balance the consumer guarantee and better serve the merchant.

The traditional media industry has been a buzz over Google CEO, Eric Schmidt’s keynote at the Newspaper Association of American Conference a few weeks ago. Like the yellow pages, the newspaper industry in under heavy attack. Schmidt argued that newspapers need to focus on an advertising-supported revenue models, quoting that Google generates 98% of its revenue from ad sales – that’s 98% of $5.51 billion in the first quarter of 2009. The majority of this revenue is from pay-for-performance text ads.

Idearc has a pay-for-performance program too, called Pay for Calls. Super Accountability could track advertising generated calls to merchants to in order to charge advertisers for demonstrated result. Tracking these calls can also help insure that quality of service (QOS) is met, and can cut off an advertiser if quality of service falls.

Controlling consumers’ phone calls to merchants could even be used to capture consumer reviews at the end of the calls. Redirecting calls from under performing merchants to higher performing advertisers creates a pipeline of new leads without printing new books or expanding the distribution of Superpages.com. All while driving additional benefit to the consumer.

Super Guarantee is a nice consumer benefit, but wont bring in (or save) ad revenue. Accountability will.

Just as Hulu and Tivo are radically changing the business model for ad-supported television broadcasters, newspapers and yellow page publishers need to find new business models. That means looking for opportunity within the threats. Transitioning advertisers to performance-based pricing serves not only advertisers and consumers (as with Super Guarantee), performance-pricing potentially delivers a lifeline to broadcasters under threat from Tivo, Hulu and others. Like Jack Bauer on 24, Idearc and other local media companies need to race against the clock to leverage their sales force to become a sales channel with the unique ability to reach the local merchant with performance-based advertising products. The benefit of this strategy is that newspapers and yellow pages can form partnerships to source leads from many sources including the episode of 24 I just watched.

How Voice Applications Will Improve Lead Generation

As a follow-up the Kelsey’s Marketplaces 2009 conference, my friend Peter Krasilovsky wrote “online leads for cars are broken.” I agree with Peter that auto shoppers will not complete a request for information form because they’ve been trained that the dealer will not follow-up. (The dealer in turn has been trained that the consumer web lead often has inaccurate and stale information). Supporting this argument, I have reviewed data indicating that voice leads (tracked phone calls) outnumber web leads about 9 to 1.

It’s interesting to compare this weakness in the “web lead” market to recent developments in voice applications. For example, Google’s relaunch GrandCentral (Google Voice), has a popular feature that uses voice recognition to transcribe voice mail to text. Google also leverages voice search in its Android, iPhone and now Blackberry mobile applications (you can say the search term using the mobile phone microphone for input.)

What do these developments have in common? Voice is a natural input and often superior to a text search. Occasionally when we need a specific part / size / brand at a local retailer or we are shopping for a service we call around to see if the part is in stock or if the service provider is available and does the type of work we need. Voice is a natural way to present this information (“Hi, I am looking for a (part) for a (thing) in size (xyz).

With voice recognition and transcription we can convert the input to text and search for the results. For example, we can search local retailers to satisfy the user’s request, and then present the request to the retailer as voice or text. Presenting the search query as a voice message in a phone call would be an efficient and quick way to deliver the lead to the merchant and satisfies the consumer (“press 1 if the thingy is in stock").

Is this where Google, and ergo the industry, is headed with voice input and voice recognition? It’s a compelling use case.

Voice and the Web Will Become Inseparable... in the Future There Will Be No Phones

Interesting review of the future without phones by Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb

Google Voice - Integrated into Search

For those of us who have been waiting (and wondering) what Google had in store for GrandCentral after the 2007 acquisition, the service has just been rebranded and significantly upgraded to Google Voice. Google Voice – which had been in beta since the acquisition and is still closed to new users - is a *smart number* with voicemail, conferencing, call control, call announce, etc (often called Voice 2.0.) Alerts are sent to SMS or email with voicemail files, notifications and more. Google Voice is also a softphone (aka click to talk), a web or mobile application used to make free domestic outbound calls (similar to Skype and others). The Google Voice softphone optionally connects callers to Goog411 – Google’s directory assistance application.

Google Voice has a very cool, but not unique, call announce feature (AccessLine has had a call announce for several years). If your Google Voice *smart* phone number receives a call from a caller with a blocked caller ID, or a caller that is not in your address book, the caller must record an announcement. The called party (you) can accept or reject the call. You can also listen in on the voice mail (and interrupt to pick-up a call sent to voicemail).

I can see a few directions where Google may be headed with Google Voice. Using Goog411 or Google Voice, searchers can announce their interest when calling merchants in the Google search results (“I need a cab and want to pay by credit card.”) Google can then route this call to the merchant available to accept the call. Integrating Google Voice into the mobile local search results offers users a powerful new option to connect with and communicate with merchants. For example, a consumer searching for a plumber in San Jose may call a business listed in the Google search results (from the web, mobile or Goog411), if that business is not available (busy, no answer, on vacation) – Google Voice can offer the caller a connection to Goog411 without the caller hanging up on the first call. That would be a very convenient way for the caller to find what they are looking for and for Google to route the caller to a ready, willing and able advertiser.

There are also mobile features for Google Voice and I can see interesting applications for Android – the Google-backed mobile OS. I’ll leave that for another post.

Call Tracking Could Save the Yellow Pages

The other day for Search Engine Land Chris Smith wrote “What Could Save the Yellow Pages? 10 ideas.”

His idea #5 is to add tracking phone numbers to every single YP ad, and let advertisers see the results. Naturally, I think this is a great idea.

I take Chris's thought further. By assigning tracking numbers to all print advertisements publishers could answer 8 of the remaining 9 ideas to save the yellow pages and here’s how: (

[Chris's idea: my thought]

1. Stop distributing books to people who no longer use them: Call tracking data would identify heavy usage households as well as non-users. The data would also reveal true service areas based on calling partners. This is great data to up-sell neighboring directories.
2. Reduce environmental impact: Distributing books based on household usage would lead to a lighter environmental impact (smaller, less frequent directories to non / light-users?).
3. Better, more dependable industry usage statistics: The call tracking data would be rock solid, empirical and does not relying on surveys.
4. Improve PR: The call tracking results would lead to improved public relations for the reasons stated above (better advertising results, lighter environmental impact.)
5. **Add tracking phone numbers to every single YP ad, and let advertisers see the results.**
6. Drop the cost of print advertising: The call tracking usage data would lead to performance pricing. Some prices will fall, and others may increase, but will be ROI-based. Consumers will receive a secondary benefit as the call tracking data will identify which business are more responsive to the calling consumer. This data acts as a base for consumer reviews. Tracking all calls will also identify demand in each market and each vertical. Prices will rise as the market for leads becomes competitive.
7. Bundle: Paying per-lead makes the source of the lead less relevant and promotes bundling.
8. Get mobile savvy: Bundling will stimulate Internet, mobile, DA and other distribution as publishers become more savvy identifying new sources of leads.
9. Fix the data: Assigning numbers to all advertisers will identity disconnected numbers, mis-categorized businesses and other indicators of poor service significantly improving the data.

YP.com Sued for "Cramming" - LEC Billing

According to the CBS Affiliate in Rockford, IL (near Chicago) YP.com was sued for tricking local merchants into a monthly fee billed on their phone bills. The practice, called LEC billing, is frequently used by incumbent yellow page publishers. The benefit is reduced churn - many advertisers mistakenly believe they have to pay the charge or lose phone service. Further, LEC billing makes it easier for the advertiser to say "yes" vs.a charge billed to a credit card, or invoicing.

It is interesting this story hits the day MerchantCircle announced 400,000 of their 650,000 merchants have no other social networking presence. Reading into the MerchantCircle press release, I estimate that about 10% of the 650,000 merchants are active (5% added a photo to their profile in October).

MerchantCircle enticed 400,000 merchants to create their first social networking profile and perhaps ~40,000 are actively building their profiles. The profile is free with several options for a paid upgrade.

FastCall411 uses autodialing to verify local listings. With such high merchant turnover in local search, we want to insure that the merchant is still in business and we also want to verify that the merchant has a history of answering their phone (good customer service) with some indication that the merchant wishes to service searching consumers.

YP.com is apparently tricking merchants into verifying their listings then billing them with a misleading sales pitch.

I am all for pushing the envelop, but the accusations against YP.com are concerning. If too many local merchants get burned our industry will suffer.

Here's the story:

Chicago – Attorney General Lisa Madigan today filed a lawsuit against a Las Vegas-based corporation, alleging that, in offering Internet yellow pages listings, this company bilked small businesses in Illinois and across the country through a practice known as “cramming.” Cramming involves adding charges to a consumer’s telephone bill that the consumer never wanted or ordered.

WIFR.com
http://www.wifr.com/home/headlines/34347459.html