As some of you know I’ve been trying
to facilitate an involvement with www.tellme.com
speech recognition tools and Asterisk. See www.studio.tellme.com
There have been a number of people who are
already integrating the two and utilizing Tellme as an ASP to deliver speech
recognition to their asterisk applications.
However I do need to update the asterisk
list that it isn’t proceeding as fast I would have originally hoped. My
original intention was to have Tellme set up a website where anyone with a
credit card could log in and purchase blocks of time in advance.
Unfortunately Tellme have decided that
they are only interested in taking commercial customers at this time (though have
indicated that from Jan they would be in a position to relook at this
situation). Below is an email between myself and Bryan which gives you an idea
on what we were looking to develop.
It’s a great opportunity for
commercial high volume applications to deliver speech without the outlay (if
you are one of these contact me for details on the trials) however I cant say I’m
not disappointed in their decision not to offer this as a prepaid service
similar to how the asterisk community is being serviced by the sms ASP’s.
If anyone has some alternative suggestions
I’m open to hearing it
Cheers,
Dean
From: Bryan A.
Pendleton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, 25 May 2005 2:16
PM
To: Dean Collins
Subject: Re: TellMe pay-as-you-go?
Yeah, I understand. It'd have to land into the community support world,
just as asterisk has for small-time users.
I'd imagine that folks like
yourself, and open-source developers who just think it'd
be neat to have certain home apps would do the support/feeding of the little
guys. TellMe would just need to provide a utility service.
Anyway, assuming that TellMe would be willing to SIP redirect (ie, I write my
app to redirect a caller to TellMe for the voice rec, but when I complete the
call somewhere, I pull TellMe out of the loop, so I'm
not paying them for termination. If that's
the case, then probably something like $0.10-$0.15/minute is reasonable.
Perhaps $0.20-$0.30 if billing were in fractional minutes (ie, 6 sec increments
like the industry does for long distance). I dunno, I'm
just making this up.... probably a monthly maintainence would also be ok. I'd like to see that be <$5/mo, unless it's just a minimum charge, rather than a flat fee.
Or, an entirely other direction is to just charge $5/mo for some big
pseudo-unmetered-until-it's-abused
usage. That would cover most home users, who'd
probably only generate a couple of dozen minutes a month, but also make the
billing system (and, correlated, number of disputes) a lot simpler to deal
with.
I'm a techie, though, not a business
man, so I'm just guessing at what I
and others doing similar things would find reasonable. I have a pay-as-you-go
toll free number, a couple of free DIDs in different area codes, and a
$0.013/minute long distance termination company that bills in 6s increments. If
folks who tinker on the horizon I do are going to use these kinds of services,
they need to be cheap.
On 5/24/05, Dean
Collins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Hey I totally agree with you about scaling down. One of my
biggest arguments with a previous client was around this exact idea.
Unfortunately I think the average personal user would want
programming support for when things go wrong, what would you do in that
situation? I don't think you could
charge them $100 for the service call on an app they only pay $10 a month for?
I agree with what you are saying, I've
flicked the Tellme team an email about your idea, may they might take your app
on as a trial.
- If they were to take it on it
would be on the understanding that it may be cancelled at any time.
- That it would not involve
support from their end.
- That it would a fully paid in
advance basis in the initial trial.
How much a minute per cycle do you think this is worth to
you?
Regards,
Dean Collins
Cognation Pty Ltd
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
+1-212-203-4357
+61-2-8307-3503 (Sydney in-dial)
From: Bryan A. Pendleton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, 24 May 2005 6:13 PM
To: Dean Collins
Subject: Re: TellMe
pay-as-you-go?
Well, for changes to the wiki, you might mention that
the service is not likely to be for personal use. It's
not totally clear from the entry.
Also, I disagree. There's absolutely
no reason that VXML hosting couldn't
be scaled to providing individual users low-volume service. It's merely a matter of having a sufficient pool of
resources, and removing all of the management cost-per-user, or making it very
very small and mostly the burden of the user. In principle, this is exactly
what VoIP termination companies like voipjet.com and voicepulse.com do, or, conversely, super-large-scale web
hosting companies, only the resource being dolled out is more expensive. You've gotta'
provide CPU cycles on app, bandwidth for VoIP and VXML requests, and bill the
operations. What's special about
VXML hosting that makes such an undertaking infeasable?
On
5/24/05, Dean Collins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
From: Bryan A. Pendleton [mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, 24 May 2005 5:06 PM
To: Dean Collins
Subject: Re: TellMe pay-as-you-go?
Right,
but you can't automate it, so the
mini-app incentive for the personal user isn't
there. If I wanted to, say, do call routing for a family VoIP system (http://geekdom.net/blog/archives/2005/01/22/more_on_my_home_voip_setup.html
), then it would be pretty easy to design, but not really worth completing
until there's a platform to run it
on.
It's sort of a cart before the horse
problem, you know? If they want to get into small-time stuff, they should out
and do it. If not, then it might be helpful for you to revise your TellMe entry
on voip-info, because a lot of people are going to get the wrong idea.
Or, put me in contact with the TellMe folks, and I'll
plead my case directly.
By the way, that post makes reference to asterisk-based VXML apps that some
group of you are developing. Where are the rest of the details?
On
5/24/05, Dean Collins <[EMAIL PROTECTED] >
wrote:
Yep, basically they are asking for the submission of a
business model and acceptance or usage/account is going to be on a per
application basis during this initial trial stage.
You can already access the studio vxml tools with asterisk to
setup a proof of concept.
From: Bryan A. Pendleton [mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, 24 May 2005 4:28 PM
To: Dean Collins
Subject: Re: TellMe pay-as-you-go?
Not commercial. A roommate works at Nuance, and I've done a few teency, mostly directory oriented
stuff as a test. Since I could never find a way to host it, it never went
beyond that. Typical "personal user with Asterisk" and tinkers with
VoIP scenario.
Usage would be pretty low, which is why I ask. The "self serve"
model, where they just let me manage my own account, and charge per minute
would be perfect, but I'm not going
to be giving them much money in any case. That's
why I'm interested.
On
5/24/05, Dean Collins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Hi Brian, at the moment this is only a trial, in the past yes
Tellme was after in excess of 100,000 minutes a month to
consider a client.
They are trying with the asterisk community to work out
some kind of self service model.
In the early stages they are really looking for people
that are able to support themselves and not place a burden on the existing
technical resources.
You mentioned that you have experience with Tellme
studio, was this for a commercial project? What is the application that you
have in mind? Do you know how much use you are looking to expect?
Etc etc.
Cheers,
Dean
From: Bryan A. Pendleton [mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, 24 May 2005 4:11 PM
To: Dean Collins
Subject: TellMe
pay-as-you-go?
How do I sign up for an account? Is it going to be
very-small-usage (~dozens or only hundreds of minutes per month) friendly? I've played with TellMe studio
in years past, but wrote it off as not applicable to my particular, low-volume
needs. More details would be lovely.
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