Tech Futures: The talkification of the web

A software switch gives browsers a voice...

The film and music industries have been turned upside down by the arrival of the internet. Now it's the turn of telecoms, argues Howard Greenfield.

The internet is set to get louder with the talkification of the web. By adding telephone functionality to HTML pages, innovative software developers are about to give your browser a voice.

It's going to change the ways we interact on the web and will create some new rules for telecoms.

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Over the past decade, as digital music, video and films have become the province of anyone with an ISP, whole industries have been transformed with each click of the mouse. And so telephony, or voice, is about to follow suit.

To innovate in a changing market, phone companies have devised new service plans, broadband programmes and triple-play offerings.

But now they are about to come face to face with the real future. Whether they can keep up with the pace of reinvention set by new start-up pioneers remains to be seen.

For years, Skype and other VoIP services have been providing an internet alternative to traditional phone service. Now a fleet of new tech companies have joined the fray in bringing voice-web integration into the mainstream.

Check out Jajah. It joins two phone lines together over the internet through a simple phone number input interface, and then connects users via local, cheaper switching stations. No installation, no download required.

Another company, Jaduka, has developed a web API that allows developers and designers to readily integrate voice communication into their applications that access the public-switched telephone network worldwide.

And going one step further is, Ribbit, which calls itself "Silicon Valley's first phone company". According to Ribbit, the walled garden model of the past must make way for a web-based, Flash-enabled world that is not bound to any particular hardware or software.

I recently met Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs at his Mountain View offices - just across Highway 101 from the campuses of Sun, Google and Microsoft.

Griggs explained his mission to empower programmers. Knowing his small start-up couldn't take the telecoms industry on alone, he created a toolkit so developers around the world could be the catalyst.

The new platform has generated e-commerce and social media applications. For instance, Salesforce.com has added interactive, visual call-logging and voice-workflow.

One-touch calling from your MySpace page is already available, and Facebook developers have integrated voice application features for community users that want to post calls for friends to track.

As described in Nicholas Carr's excellent recent primer on cloud computing, ="" class="c-regularLink" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">The Big Switch, Ribbit is also based on a big switch - a Lucent-certified, carrier grade SmartSwitch capable of delivering 10 million phone voice minutes a month.

The present state of play is a tabula rasa according to Griggs, who maintains that if the telecoms industry were invented today, it would bypass the current scrapheap of pre-internet, analogue architecture.

Cyberspace is saturated with new services and innovation isn't going away, certainly not in this decade. Google reports enormous usage spikes of between 1,000 and 2,000 per cent whenever it improves its data plan, user interface, or application. Likewise, users will continue to flock to new and exciting internet functionality.

In any emerging market, there's always hype about the next big shift ahead. But talkification is going to spread because companies like Ribbit are offering drag-and-drop tools that make telecoms functionality a native HTML page feature.

"We're building a high-level tool so that a non-programmer can incorporate telecoms without one line of code" says Griggs.

At last count, Ribbit had more than 3,700 developers from more than 65 countries with a new communications application emerging every week. Real-time conversation may soon be as commonplace as search across many web applications.

It's not conspicuous but there is "a race to talkify the web" Skype Journal editor Phil Wolff wrote to me. Adding voice to your browser is the first step in that process.

Instead of simply creating more noise, it's going to create a stronger online connection between people. As Wolff says "it will humanise our onlives, and we need more of that, don't we?"

Howard Greenfield, president of Go Associates, is a digital media strategist, columnist, and co-author of IPTV & Internet Video, Focal Press, 2007.