Cheap Phones Don't Help Voice Quality

Voice quality has been long neglected, thanks in good part due to the choice of consumers and businesses alike for the convenience of mobility and the lowest-cost phones in many cases. It will take years to repair the damage, to the determent of voice-enabled services and applications. Communications providers and equipment manufacturers need to start by raising awareness that you get what you pay for in the handset industry, be it mobile handsets or desktop IP phones.

Why is voice quality increasing important? Voice as a data type is being used to power IVRs – much to the chagrin of all of us who prefer to speak to a live human – personal assistants such as Apple's Siri and Google Now, voice biometrics to cut call center service times, and the driver for ease-of-use applications such as telling your TV to change channels or to select music from your stereo.

I had an eye-opening discussion yesterday with Michael Frank, CTO of Navvo. The company makes the Voco family products that use voice to control the selection of music in your living room. Rather than fumbling around typing an artist's name or song title, you tell the Voco mobile device app what you want. It goes to the "cloud" to figure out what you've said and then pops up a short list of the closest matches. Tap on an option for server software on your PC to pull up the song and stream it to a Voco device for playing.

Voco is easy to use, but the devices aren't cheap, ranging from $299.99 to $399.99 list price. You're melding a consumer Ethernet device that does audio out and has to managing streaming from another local device and juggling it with a phone app and a server process on a PC.

For Voco to work, it relies on voice input from the mobile device, either an Apple iOS iPhone or iPad or an Android phone tablet. Frank has data from thousands of buyers on the effectiveness and voice input quality of their mobile devices and he's a bit concerned about the future.

About 40 percent of Voco buyers have Apple iOS devices, with the results being "consistently" in the middle. The other 60 percent are Android devices and drastically split in the middle between outstanding and poor.

"There's no middle ground," Frank said. He's concerned the data he's currently getting will skew to the lowest and cheapest phones over time, making Voco's job of using voice a lot more difficult. "If you sign up at T-Mobile or Verizon, how much are you paying for your phone? You may get what's on sale this month."

Low-cost phones mean lower-cost components and less voice processing technology built into the package. For a voice-dependent service like Voco, cheap devices unable to cleanly process voice actually damage the value of what is being offered.

Frank's concerns are an issue for business and consumer usage, but I'm hoping carriers wise up to the fact that cheap phones will ultimately hurt their bottom line in offering and delivering voice-enabled services. Service providers may end up having to provide guidance to subscribers and businesses that the cheapest device isn't necessarily the best device for voice applications, while manufacturers would do well to promote quality as an attribute across product lines.