State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

A number of competing services are available for providing information and answers to questions on a mobile phone (Telenor Ask in Pakistan, Google’s sms and voice, Microsoft TellMe). ChaCha enters this crowded market with a free, human powered offering. I wonder if the premium service from Telenor Ask is a hit with users in Pakistan?

ChaCha is avaialble in US via SMS (242242) and Voice (800-2chacha). An excerpt from Mossberg’s review:

The service works by routing your questions to one of 10,000 hired “guides” — students, stay-at-home parents, retirees and others — who look up the questions on the Web and reply. They get paid 20 cents per answer.

Naturally, these guides vary as to their speed and accuracy. If you don’t like the answers they give you, or you want related information, you can call back or reply to the text message with a follow-up question. For instance, after learning which pitcher had won for Boston, I asked who lost the game for New York. I was quickly informed it was Phil Hughes.

Overall, I liked ChaCha. In most cases, I received fast, accurate, useful answers. But it has two weaknesses. One is that the low-paid, part-time guides can provide inconsistent service. When I asked for the best Mexican restaurant in D.C., for example, ChaCha came up with a choice that few locals would cite.

The other is that, unlike many other cellphone information services, ChaCha doesn’t automatically know your location. So, unless you include a location in your query, it’s clueless about questions such as “Where’s the nearest drugstore?”

As mentioned a while ago on TelecomPk, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) had started investigation and corrective measures to combat fraudulent and fake SIMs with cooperation of mobile companies and NADRA. This month PTA has release some numbers about their efforts.

PTA issued detailed operating procedures for mobile operators to ensure sale of new SIMs with proper documentation and had asked for verification of old records through NADRA. Cellular mobile companies have completed verification of approximately 85% data of their subscribers through NADRA.

More from the PTA press release:

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Here’s one more company claiming to fix the yet unsolved problem of speech recognition on mobile phones. I’d like to see their speech-to-text solution in action or hear from someone who has tried it out. Read the complete article about Vlingo’s voice-recognition interface at Tech Review site. The key differentiators are a) that it uses Hierarchical Language Models and Adaptation techniques and b) you can train this software easily by fixing the text it gives you. And by the way, this article is available in audio as well (registration required). Here are some excerpts:

Vlingo, a startup in Cambridge, MA, is coming to market with a ­simple user interface that provides speech recognition across mobile-phone applications. “We are not developing the core speech-recognition engine,” says cofounder Michael ­Phillips, a former MIT research scientist and founder of SpeechWorks, which developed call-center speech interfaces. “We don’t need to do that again.” Instead, Vlingo takes speech, turns it into text, and provides a simple way to correct errors using the phone’s navigation keys, helping the system “learn.” The user’s spoken words travel over a mobile Internet connection for analysis on Vlingo’s server, sparing the phone the heavy computational work; the transcription appears less than two seconds later.

“Small platforms need speech, and search is a powerful way to find information,” says James Glass, head of the spoken-language systems group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “The combination of the two is very powerful,” he says, adding that Vlingo is working at that frontier.

Mazin Gilbert, executive director of natural­-language processing at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, NJ, says others, including AT&T, are also developing speech interfaces for mobile phones; he thinks one problem will be “providing the right user experience in a cost-­effective, scalable way.”

As I reported earlier, Google gives cellphone users a mini version of its search engine which can be used via sms and speech. Now Google wants to become a gateway for finding and paying for mobile media content. It is also trying to come up with a service to broker ads for other mobile web sites, competing with Yahoo and start-ups in the lucrative mobile advertising space.

According to Yankee Group, global sales of music, video, ring-tones and other content reached $27.4 billion last year, and they are expected to grow to $59.3 billion by 2011. With the new system by Google, users would search for a piece of content – such as a popular ring-tone — and get back a list of providers as well as links enabling them to easily purchase the material. Google can charge companies for high placement in the search results, much the way it offers “sponsored links” on computer Web searches.

WSJ reports on this:

Google has been working for months with content providers — including large entertainment companies and smaller mobile-media aggregators — to index their material and make it available via mobile search. But the project has been marred by a series of technical delays, people familiar with the matter say, illustrating that there’s a learning curve as Internet giants adjust to the peculiarities of the mobile world. It isn’t clear how soon Google plans to launch the service.

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