Emerging Technology: Voice Mashups
There is a word that has been a part of the music industry for a long time which is just making its way into the worlds of business and technology. That word is “mashup”. Originally, it was a phrase which was used to describe two or more songs being “mashed” together to create an entirely new song, an art primarily practiced by digital DJs. These days, “mashup” is a more general term used to describe the act of taking data from multiple sources and putting it into one application. An emerging aspect of this in business is the possibility of creating voice mashups.
When people in business and technology talk about mashups today, they are most commonly talking about web applications that “mash” together different data sources to create a new site which combines the sources. A popular example of this is HousingMaps.com which takes information about available housing rentals from Craigslist and combines it with information about location from Google Maps. People searching for home rentals don’t need to go back and forth between the two sites because they can look at everything in the one place where it’s “mashed up” together.
We are starting to see businesses take advantage of the idea of the “mashup” to bring together data from their different internal sources as well as from external sources to create one final end product. One example (given by Wikipedia) is a company that takes an external list of houses that have sold in an area and combines it with an internal list of the houses sold by their company to create a market share report. Businesses of any type or size could combine information in this way to create a mash-up.
And we’re starting to see movement towards recognition that this can be done with voice services as well in an emerging type of mashup called the “voice mashup”. At the beginning of this month, VoIP and technology expert Alex Saunders hosted a phone conference about this topic. (You can read about it here and here or listen to the podcast here.) In this conference, the “voice mashup” is defined as both a “lightweight application that takes its functionality and data from more than one source” and as a “combination of multiple data sources, multiple services, that are not normally housed by the same provider initially.” In other words, it means that there are many different types of voice services which come from different places and are used to create an entirely new service or product.
For the small business, this means that there could soon be a plethora of new applications which further assist to streamline the way that companies operate. This is particularly true of people who already use VoIP services since these are inherently designed to integrate different types of data in one location. The Thomas Howe Company is a leading voice in this area of development so if mashups are something that you think that your business might benefit from, you’ll want to pay attention to the news coming from them.
Question of the Day: What types of voice applications would you like to see merged into a mashup?
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