[Asterisk-Users] FW: TellMe pay-as-you-go? - UPDATE

Wed Jun 1 06:51:27 MST 2005

As some of you know I've been trying to facilitate an involvement with
www.tellme.com <http://www.tellme.com/>  speech recognition tools and
Asterisk. See www.studio.tellme.com <http://www.studio.tellme.com/>  

There have been a number of people who are already integrating the two
and utilizing Tellme as an ASP to deliver speech recognition to their
asterisk applications.

However I do need to update the asterisk list that it isn't proceeding
as fast I would have originally hoped. My original intention was to have
Tellme set up a website where anyone with a credit card could log in and
purchase blocks of time in advance.

Unfortunately Tellme have decided that they are only interested in
taking commercial customers at this time (though have indicated that
from Jan they would be in a position to relook at this situation). Below
is an email between myself and Bryan which gives you an idea on what we
were looking to develop.

It's a great opportunity for commercial high volume applications to
deliver speech without the outlay (if you are one of these contact me
for details on the trials) however I cant say I'm not disappointed in
their decision not to offer this as a prepaid service similar to how the
asterisk community is being serviced by the sms ASP's.

If anyone has some alternative suggestions I'm open to hearing it

Cheers,

Dean

________________________________

From: Bryan A. Pendleton [mailto:bpendleton at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, 25 May 2005 2:16 PM
To: Dean Collins
Subject: Re: TellMe pay-as-you-go?

Yeah, I understand. It'd have to land into the community support world,
just as asterisk has for small-time users.

I'd imagine that folks like yourself, and open-source developers who
just think it'd be neat to have certain home apps would do the
support/feeding of the little guys. TellMe would just need to provide a
utility service.

Anyway, assuming that TellMe would be willing to SIP redirect (ie, I
write my app to redirect a caller to TellMe for the voice rec, but when
I complete the call somewhere, I pull TellMe out of the loop, so I'm not
paying them for termination. If that's the case, then probably something
like $0.10-$0.15/minute is reasonable. Perhaps $0.20-$0.30 if billing
were in fractional minutes (ie, 6 sec increments like the industry does
for long distance). I dunno, I'm just making this up.... probably a
monthly maintainence would also be ok. I'd like to see that be <$5/mo,
unless it's just a minimum charge, rather than a flat fee. Or, an
entirely other direction is to just charge $5/mo for some big
pseudo-unmetered-until-it's-abused usage. That would cover most home
users, who'd probably only generate a couple of dozen minutes a month,
but also make the billing system (and, correlated, number of disputes) a
lot simpler to deal with.

I'm a techie, though, not a business man, so I'm just guessing at what I
and others doing similar things would find reasonable. I have a
pay-as-you-go toll free number, a couple of free DIDs in different area
codes, and a $0.013/minute long distance termination company that bills
in 6s increments. If folks who tinker on the horizon I do are going to
use these kinds of services, they need to be cheap.

On 5/24/05, Dean Collins <Dean at collins.net.pr> wrote:

Hey I totally agree with you about scaling down. One of my biggest
arguments with a previous client was around this exact idea.

Unfortunately I think the average personal user would want programming
support for when things go wrong, what would you do in that situation? I
don't think you could charge them $100 for the service call on an app
they only pay $10 a month for?

I agree with what you are saying, I've flicked the Tellme team an email
about your idea, may they might take your app on as a trial.

*	If they were to take it on it would be on the understanding that
it may be cancelled at any time.
*	That it would not involve support from their end.
*	That it would a fully paid in advance basis in the initial
trial. 

How much a minute per cycle do you think this is worth to you?

Regards,

Dean Collins

Cognation Pty Ltd

dean at cognation.net 

+1-212-203-4357

+61-2-8307-3503 (Sydney in-dial)

________________________________

From: Bryan A. Pendleton [mailto:bpendleton at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, 24 May 2005 6:13 PM

To: Dean Collins
Subject: Re: TellMe pay-as-you-go?

Well, for changes to the wiki, you might mention that the service is not
likely to be for personal use. It's not totally clear from the entry.

Also, I disagree. There's absolutely no reason that VXML hosting
couldn't be scaled to providing individual users low-volume service.
It's merely a matter of having a sufficient pool of resources, and
removing all of the management cost-per-user, or making it very very
small and mostly the burden of the user. In principle, this is exactly
what VoIP termination companies like voipjet.com and voicepulse.com do,
or, conversely, super-large-scale web hosting companies, only the
resource being dolled out is more expensive. You've gotta' provide CPU
cycles on app, bandwidth for VoIP and VXML requests, and bill the
operations. What's special about VXML hosting that makes such an
undertaking infeasable?

On 5/24/05, Dean Collins <Dean at collins.net.pr> wrote:

________________________________

From: Bryan A. Pendleton [mailto: bpendleton at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, 24 May 2005 5:06 PM

To: Dean Collins
Subject: Re: TellMe pay-as-you-go?

Right, but you can't automate it, so the mini-app incentive for the
personal user isn't there. If I wanted to, say, do call routing for a
family VoIP system
(http://geekdom.net/blog/archives/2005/01/22/more_on_my_home_voip_setup.
html ), then it would be pretty easy to design, but not really worth
completing until there's a platform to run it on. 

It's sort of a cart before the horse problem, you know? If they want to
get into small-time stuff, they should out and do it. If not, then it
might be helpful for you to revise your TellMe entry on voip-info,
because a lot of people are going to get the wrong idea.

Or, put me in contact with the TellMe folks, and I'll plead my case
directly.

By the way, that post makes reference to asterisk-based VXML apps that
some group of you are developing. Where are the rest of the details?

On 5/24/05, Dean Collins <Dean at collins.net.pr > wrote:

Yep, basically they are asking for the submission of a business model
and acceptance or usage/account is going to be on a per application
basis during this initial trial stage.

You can already access the studio vxml tools with asterisk to setup a
proof of concept.

________________________________

From: Bryan A. Pendleton [mailto: bpendleton at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, 24 May 2005 4:28 PM
To: Dean Collins
Subject: Re: TellMe pay-as-you-go?

Not commercial. A roommate works at Nuance, and I've done a few teency,
mostly directory oriented stuff as a test. Since I could never find a
way to host it, it never went beyond that. Typical "personal user with
Asterisk" and tinkers with VoIP scenario.

Usage would be pretty low, which is why I ask. The "self serve" model,
where they just let me manage my own account, and charge per minute
would be perfect, but I'm not going to be giving them much money in any
case. That's why I'm interested. 

On 5/24/05, Dean Collins <Dean at collins.net.pr> wrote: 

Hi Brian, at the moment this is only a trial, in the past yes Tellme was
after in excess of 100,000 minutes a month to consider a client.

 They are trying with the asterisk community to work out some kind of
self service model.

 In the early stages they are really looking for people that are able to
support themselves and not place a burden on the existing technical
resources.

 You mentioned that you have experience with Tellme studio, was this for
a commercial project? What is the application that you have in mind? Do
you know how much use you are looking to expect?

 Etc etc.

 Cheers,
 Dean

________________________________

From: Bryan A. Pendleton [mailto: bpendleton at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, 24 May 2005 4:11 PM
To: Dean Collins
Subject: TellMe pay-as-you-go?

How do I sign up for an account? Is it going to be very-small-usage
(~dozens or only hundreds of minutes per month) friendly? I've played
with TellMe studio in years past, but wrote it off as not applicable to
my particular, low-volume needs. More details would be lovely.

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