BPL Brings Kirusa's Voice SMS to Subscribers in Mumbai
NEW PROVIDENCE, N.J. and MUMBAI, India - BPL mobile, a mobile carrier operating in Mumbai, launched a new Voice SMS service for its users in Mumbai that will enable BPL subscribers to send spoken SMS messages to any other mobile subscriber in India. BPL has chosen Kirusa, a US-based developer of value added mobile services to deploy the patented and patent-pending Kirusa Voice SMS Solution.
The Kirusa Voice SMS service is available to all BPL prepaid and postpaid subscribers in Mumbai. With this new service, any BPL subscriber can send an SMS message in their own voice. This is a multilingual service where subscribers can use any language to send Voice SMS messages. The Kirusa Voice SMS service allows a user to leave a voice message without having the phone ring (RingFreeMessaging).
A BPL user, dials * followed by the recipient's phone number, and then speaks a short message, in the language of his choice. The recipient gets an SMS message and can retrieve the message by dialing a Direct Listen number embedded in the SMS message, which takes the recipient directly to the message of interest, without the need to navigate through multiple messages. A BPL subscriber can also dial *0* to retrieve new messages, and *1* to retrieve old messages. Moreover, the recipient can forward and reply the Voice SMS message like a text message.
While launching the Voice SMS service, Mr. S. Subramaniam, CEO of BPL Mobile stated, "There is a lot of language diversity and literacy issues existing in our society. Kirusa's Voice SMS service is an excellent way to extend SMS, which is just plain English text catering to educated users. BPL Mobile has always been in the forefront of adding new services for its subscribers. An important segment where we foresee a demand for Voice SMS is the youth community, as the Voice SMS is not just about sending a message, it is about sharing an emotion."
While elaborating on why Kirusa has been chosen for introducing this service, Mr. Sunzay Passari, VP - VAS & Devices, BPL Mobile quoted, "It was important for us to choose the best solution for Voice SMS. Kirusa matches all the requirements that are needed for the Voice SMS solution. The company has established itself as the undisputed leader in Voice SMS across the world. Their patented technologies make the service very easy to use. Apart from being pioneers in this field, the other key attraction of Kirusa is the international interoperability and its multimodal platform".
Kirusa has delivered and deployed the Kirusa multimodal platform, the HP OpenCall Media Platform, and the KV.SMS application in BPL's data center in India, and has integrated the solution into BPL's wireless network. The platform used by Kirusa enables BPL to deploy additional services that combine voice with text, graphics, and video.