Brian Lichorowic, President and CEO, Audiopoint

Q Give us a brief history of Audiopoint. How did this business get started?
A Audiopoint was founded in June 1999, at which time we launched a Voice Portal on our 1.0 speech platform. It's a common start-up story. Audiopoint received substantial funding early in its inception, but this money was quickly burned through by previous management. The current management team was brought in to close the doors or to find a suitor. After targeting a niche market and revitalizing some of the technologies, Audiopoint landed several customers, including EarthLink, to provide speech enabled services. At that time, the true potential of Audiopoint was realized and the mindset turned from closure to growth. Q You offer both business and consumer solutions. Can you explain the differences in your offerings/services?
A Scale mainly…We have the ability to provide a 100% hosted or an on premise solution whether that be for the Voice Terminal service, our CMS module or any of our other technologies. One of the big push-backs for speech applications in any market has been the outrageous cost of deploying a speech-enabled service in a corporation. We've tried to allow our customers to implement it in a hosted solution first thereby justifying the ROI model for an on premise deployment. It seems to make sense to people. Q There are a lot of companies trying to provide better access for employees while away from the office, how is the Audiopoint offering (Voice Terminal) different from other solutions such as Blackberry, wireless PDA's among others?
A Voice Terminal is hardware agnostic and 100% voice enabled. You can access our service from any phone anywhere. Using only your voice. It's that simple… Q What do you believe will be key market drivers for these services in the short-term? Long-term?
A Speech technology hit the market under a high level of false assumptions. Everybody was expecting a Star Trek type interface to be enabled with little or no problem to their existing services. As we know, this wasn't the case. The market is starting to realize that these services remain an organic technology growing at a slow evolutionary pace, more so than the high-end revolutionary pace that the market expected two years ago. Speech enabling of common everyday tasks such as e-mail, sales force automations or simple data capture have become more realistic and excepted in the marketplace. Our success has been living proof of that. This is opening doors and is allowing companies to explore voice enabling a wider range of services within their company for a smaller cost and thereby justifying the turn of investment needed. Q Who do you consider to be your major competitors?
A Certain applications have individual competitors, such as our Voice Terminal e-mail by phone product, which competes directly with proprietary services such as AOL by Phone and Yahoo by Phone. Individually any company that is offering some semblance of speech services such as AT&T or Quest could qualify as a competitor. For the most part, as a true speech technology company, we view ourselves as one of the few survivors in our space, focusing on speech and speech-enabled technologies alone. Q In regard to your business solutions, do you see any vertical markets as being more likely to adopt your services?
A Vertical markets in relation to speech technologies have been beaten to death. Travel, call centers, airlines, financial institutions, have been called upon by every speech technology company five times over, and in some cases, even presented to with the same PowerPoint presentation, having only the company logos swapped out. Small pieces of the technology are being accepted in certain verticals. The mobile business user, corporations with large outwardly sales forces or multiple employee locations look to be the markets with the most rapid adoption of technology. However, we still think there is that one true bluebird call center sale coming. Q How can consumers purchase your services? Do you offer flexibility with your service plans?
A Our Voice Terminal Service is available for purchase directly over the Internet (http://www.voiceterminal.net) using any major credit card. We also offer a testing and enabling matrix that allows the user to immediately know whether their e-mail address can be instantly voice enabled by our service. It's pretty cool! Q What can the speech technology developers do to provide you with more assistance in growing this space?
A Naturally the cost of deploying speech ports still remains high for a start-up with a little amount of venture to grow, making the cost of sales still extremely high. Speech technology developers are realizing that having their developers be successful makes them successful. That message was received and understood quite a long time ago, but at the same time, too late for some companies to survive. We're fighting against a stigma that has three assumptions about all speech related technologies: 1. Extremely expensive 2. It doesn't work that well 3. It's very difficult to use. Companies in this space have over promised and under delivered in levels of quality service that there's a high level of speculation for even the simplest of applications to be deployed. Can you name one killer speech-enabled application in the marketplace? Like a Eudora or a Netscape in the browser world. No not yet, But they're coming, and that will be the sign that the technology has arrived. Q Who provides your core speech engine?
A Nuance--They've been great to work with.