When the talk about unified communications started, I was skeptical.
It sounded like the marketers had tweaked the older term unified messaging in hopes of getting it back into the spotlight after people had grown tired of hearing about it. And to some extent, that’s what happened.
But there is a subtle difference. Where unified messaging referred to getting your voice mail and e-mail in one place, unified communications aims to give you a single identity so you can be reached through different media – voice, e-mail, text, even video – on different devices, wherever you are.
That’s attractive and useful, and it’s real. It comes in many forms, not all of them explicitly labeled unified communications.
My business cards only have one phone number on them. Call it, and the phone in my office rings, and so does my mobile phone. There are many ways of doing this today. If I need to, I can also make that number ring any other phone, or route calls to a PC. If I don’t answer, leave me a voice message, and I can retrieve that from any phone or play it back on the Web or listen to the .WAV file that gets sent to my e-mail.
Similarly, send me an e-mail and it will show up on my desktop computer, or my laptop, or my mobile phone.
Recently, several Canadian telcos launched voice mail-to-text services. Call a mobile subscriber, leave a voice message, and a few minutes later your message, translated into text, appears as a text message on the recipient’s phone. I tried Rogers’ service, and the speech recognition actually works pretty well. It tends to get proper names wrong, but words that are in the dictionary it mostly gets right.
Bell Canada decided to be contrarian and, while Telus, Rogers and SaskTel were all doing voice mail-to-text, Bell announced text-to-voice. Send a text message from a Bell mobile phone to a landline, and it will be turned into synthesized voice.
At the same time Bell announced the ability to listen to voice messages on the Web. That feature, by the way, isn’t terribly interesting most of the time, but if you’re traveling outside Canada it can save you plenty.
All this is available today – to anyone. Enterprise unified communications systems can add some other features, one of the most interesting of which is presence detection. You can see whether someone is available before deciding whether to e-mail, call or text.
“It increases the probability of contacting someone right on the first attempt,” says Ron Gruia, enterprise communications program leader at Frost & Sullivan Canada in Toronto.
It may also make it harder to choose who you’re available to, though.
The ability to combine voice and text chat, or switch from one to the other, could be very handy for distant co-workers too. Even this is available to all, if you don’t mind putting up with Skype’s occasional voice-quality glitches.
The marketers may be playing name games, and some of these capabilities have been talked about for years, but beneath the unified communications hype is a real shift in the way we communicate. It’s much easier than it used to be to stay in touch when you want to, and as long as we remember that critical phrase when you want to, that’s a good thing.