Subject: wireless services

From: "James P. Salsman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 02:04:34 -0700 (PDT)

Where, and by whom, is wireless service with the following features offered?

1.  An option for incoming telephone calls to go directly to voicemail, 
transmitting spoken messages asynchronously to a buffer inside the telephone 
transceiver, using a reliable transport of high quality audio.  Messages 
could thereby be played back in regions without good RF conditions, and 
replayed any number of times without incurring additional airtime charges.

2.  A means to send voice messages to email destinations with an Internet 
message containing a URL pointing to a web server with a choice of audio 
formats from which the message would be played back.  Again, it would be 
preferable if such messages were buffered on the telephone transceiver, 
sent reliably, asynchronously, and using high quality audio, because RF 
congestion could cease to be a significant problem if circuit-switched 
telephone connections were replaced with the flexibility of packet TDMA.
 
3.  A means to send similarly asynchronous messages to telephone 
destinations with an automated outbound call announcing the message sent 
and offering to play the message upon a touch-tone response, or announcing 
the telephone and access numbers with which the message can be retrieved 
(in case the announcement ends up in the recipient's voicemail.)

4.  A means to send instructions for retrieving such messages using 
numeric page or SMS messages for other wireless destinations. 

5.  A means for recipients of messages as described in 2-4 above to reply 
with spoken or numeric or short text messages.  The identity of the message 
being replied to should be clear from the characteristics of the reply.

6.  A serial port on the telephone transceiver providing a PPP link to a 
laptop, palmtop, desktop, or server with severed net connection, etc.

Any one of those features would provide far more value to me and most of 
the people I know than WAP.

Who was/will be first to market with them?

Asynchronous voice messaging is very useful when replies are easy -- 
which is not the case with most voicemail systems in use today.  
Effective asynchronous voice messaging will be a more important 
application than either web or email service on wireless platforms 
because the portable nature of wireless devices is simply antithetical 
to bulky keyboards and large displays.

Cheers,
James

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From: Aditya Mohan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2000 16:01:20 +0530

Hi James

You are certainly correct to some extent . These type of features ARE useful . I
myself would like to use them. But why are you segregating these voice features
with web/email/WAP?? To be more specific using WAP, we can easily incorporate
these features in today's cellular phone. Rember , in WAP we have some thing
called the WTAI ( Wireless Telephony Application Interface ) that provides
services like auto call back, voice mail etc to mobile handset via concept of
WTA Server.

Internet has the power to be available to us any time anywhere , and we should
use this facility as effectively as possible either via wireline links  or
Wireless

cheers
Aditya