In an elicitation similar to the trademark dictum of the late Carl Sagan, Tellme Networks announced today that it has sold billions and billions of voice application time to its enterprise customers.
Actually, the company says it has only sold a little more than one billion, but that’s still the biggest claim from any competitor in the space to date.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, which launched just over six months ago, enables clients to buy minutes on its carrier-grade telephony infrastructure and VoiceXML platform to run voice applications and services. The service is primarily used for businesses looking to further automate the customer telephone session, a clear ode to joy for errant customers who were so dreadfully tired of communicating with real people all the time.
Sarcasm aside, CEO Mike McCue reminds that the cost of handling transactions over the phone is exponentially higher than handling transactions over the Web, which is why Tellme touts itself as a clear value-add for clients with a moderate-to-large customer base.
“Tellme brings the benefits of doing business on the Web to the telephone,” he says, simply. “This dramatically reduces costs and drives new revenue opportunities for businesses worldwide.”
Aside from simply hosting voice applications, Tellme also offers professional services for the design and development of unique voice applications for niche markets, as well as prefab apps for airlines, banks or general information services like weather or traffic reports.
McCue says the Tellme Network services millions of calls every week, including more than 1.2 million speech transactions daily.
“In addition, more than 10,000 developers today use Tellme’s open VoiceXML platform and tools to develop interactive voice applications,” he says, “making it the largest community of VoiceXML developers in the world.”
BeVocal, Vocal Point and Quack.com, all Bay Area companies, are also competing in the voice portal space.
