VoIP Beta Testing Blues

Points of View

I’d bet you love Beta testing new calling features for your favorite hosted pbx service provider.

No?

I want YOU for some VoIP BETA testing

What am I thinking! Of course – who in their right mind would Beta test a phone service? After all, telephones are the veins of your business, a vital part of its organism. And how would you report a problem if your phone service goes down?

So when your VoIP service provider asked if you would be interested in becoming an important part of their field beta testing program for a brand new set of features in a new release of a product that can still be littered with bugs you firmly said “No, thanks”.

You are not eager to jump on an opportunity to provide that important input, make user interface more friendly, participate in development and even sneak in a feature request that your business will benefit from the most!?. Your business is too good to be running some untested Beta software?

Well, maybe another customer is willing… No? Anyone? Someone?

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Wideband Audio Adoption: Obstacles to Clear Calls

Harping on the low quality transmissions offered by traditional phone lines is something of a cliché. You won’t find anyone who argues a traditional landline replicates voice quality clearly and cleanly. Instead, we’ve all become accustomed to the distortion, clipping and general fuzziness involved in making and receiving calls from traditional landline phones. And those offer a superb voice quality in comparison to most cell phones. Unfortunately many of us have simply accepted low audio quality as a “cost of doing business” when using telephone services.

And transmissions on traditional land line phones sound positively crisp compared to calls made between cell phones. Since the proliferation of mobile devices, the audio reproduction problems of traditional landlines seem miniscule. In fact, many people have come to believe traditional landlines offer the highest audio quality possible.

This isn’t true.

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Automated Transcription? Be Careful What You Wish For!

speech enabled email
Voice recognition technology has finally reached a level of sophistication matching the precision and native awareness of human transcription! Just check out the level of unbelievable naturalness offered by Google Voice, the search giant’s flagship automated voicemail transcription service-

 

“Hi Oleg, My name is patio and I got your message for focal stuff I’m selling,
please give me a call back… my number is XXXXXXXXX18 Thank God.”

 

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From SIP Handsets to Totally Mobile?

I talked to a friend recently who was full of excitement over the news from his employer that the sales team (of which he belongs) was going to receive new smartphones. His excitement was easy to understand: the entire 50 person sales team was getting brand new iPhones that were going to replace their SIP handsets and older PBX desk phones. Considering the cost of smartphones and voice quality concerns, you understand my curiosity about what would drive the company to do such a thing. Given all the changes in the mobile market and where the future of telephony seems to be headed, I tried to follow the company logic.

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Guide to Calculating TCO of Your Phone System

Understanding Total Cost of Ownership of a PBX System

Cost is a major factor that drives virtually every decision a business owner makes. Not only is it important to look at the up-front costs of something, the total cost of ownership comes into play, too. For some companies, it might be worthwhile to lay out more capital in the short-term, if it parlays into long-term savings. For others, they might not use a product or service long enough to justify the initial set up costs. This is true of a hosted phone system, just like it is for anything else.

Is Video Conferencing a New Technology?

Video Conferencing Solution

Most of the technologies we feel are incredibly new, cutting-edge and revolutionary. Truth be told, they are often not nearly as fresh, as we tend to believe. In reality, most of the technologies we consider game-changing have, in one form or another, been around for a long time. Radical shifts in technology are very rare. What changes over time is the quality, availability and application of technology. We see a very good example of this in the evolution of video conferencing.

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