Internet telephony is going through a long gestation period. Full of promise, the use of the Internet for phone conversations has yet to become commonplace. Still, a number of companies are now poised to use the same basic technology – carrying voice over the Net – to provide a variety of services, from teleconferencing over a corporate intranet to voice-based chat groups, games, and distance-learning applications.
Unlike telephone conversations, which typically involve person-to-person communication, several of the new products are aimed at allowing multiple users to talk to each other over the Internet.
Among the leading contenders in the field, Princeton, New Jersey-based Voxware is expected to release VoxChat by the end of June. The client/server package will let any Web site operator create a voice-based chat room. OnLive of Sunnyvale, California, has turned its attention to audio-conferencing technology after initially focusing on building 3-D virtual communities. Its OnLive Community Server, released in November, can host a conversation with as many as 100 users. And in May, Internet telephony pioneer VocalTec, an Israeli company, introduced Atrium, a conferencing system for corporate intranets in which participants can use either phones or their PCs.
These technologies are rapidly making their way into new products. On Tuesday, Prodigy announced that it was using Voxware technology for voice-based functions in its chat rooms. Although America Online says it has announced no plans to introduce audio-based chat systems, it licensed Voxware's technology last October. And recently, Creative Labs said it would use OnLive technology to build its own voice-chat service.
Voxware and OnLive both license the technology to OEMs and build their own products. They each target different, although somewhat overlapping, markets.
Besides audio chat rooms for the entertainment market, Voxware is focused on the field of distance learning and online entertainment. Online University, for instance, uses the technology to teach courses over the Internet, says Joan Spindel, Voxware's vice president of marketing.
Similarly, OnLive is being used by EF Education, a Swedish company, to teach courses in English as a second language over the Internet in Europe. But the company is increasingly focused on marketing to the corporate training, voice conferencing, and business collaboration markets, says John Shea, senior product manager at OnLive.
"Businesses spend billions of dollars in audio conferencing," Shea says. "This allows them to do it over the Internet or their intranet."
Both OnLive and Voxware have built into their chat servers systems for handling many speakers at once, and both companies boast of rival compression technologies that are aimed at reducing network bottlenecks. But as is the case with Internet telephony applications, the voice-conferencing systems still have to bridge technological gaps that do not depend on the voice technology itself, but on the networks' ability to deliver voice packets efficiently.
During a recent demonstration, Voxware's chat server appeared to work quite well, with about a dozen users around the world exchanging tidbits of idle conversation. But Spindel admits that if the network is experiencing problems, the quality and reliability of the service suffers. This week, the company is testing its product publicly. Users who download Voxware's free client can participate in the International Leadership Forum for Women with Disabilities in Washington, DC.
Industry analysts say the technical impediments to voice-chat systems appear to be crumbling.
"I don't think there are any fundamental technological barriers," says Christopher Mines, an analyst with Forrester Research.
Although he hasn't studied the voice-conferencing market, Mines recently issued a very upbeat report about the future of Internet telephony. "The question marks are about how quickly the problems can be solved, not if they can be solved."
Jeff Pulver, the founder of Voice on the Net Coalition, agrees. "The real challenge is not going to be the technology, but the adoption of it," Pulver says. "You need a killer app to drive market awareness."
On the one hand, targeting communications over a corporate intranet, where networks are relatively controlled environments, makes sense. On the other hand, the killer app of the Internet remains the chat room, with AOL alone boasting of 1 million chat hours in 14,000 different forums every day. Voice chat, which would bring popular so-called "party lines" to the Internet, could soon be the next big thing.
