Voice on the Go has great market timing but it wasn't by chance. The founding employees of the Toronto-based company saw the need coming for their product - an in-car system that enables a driver to e-mail, text, Facebook, Tweet and more while driving, hands-free and by voice on any mobile phone - and pounced on it as a killer idea.
"We foresaw that driving legislation would become more pervasive," says John McLeod, chief executive officer of Voice on the Go, noting that laws prohibiting texting with handheld devices while driving have passed in several provinces.
"Like drinking and driving, texting and driving was going to become a larger issue in legislative minds as well as people's minds. The only way around it was by using your voice. We all thought the voice space would explode and that the time would be right where interacting by voice hands-free while driving would be the way of the future.
"Now that it's in the market, the time is right because there's a lot of interest in distracted driving and the laws are coming into place. People are aware about texting and driving so our growth has just been explosive."
Hands-free calling finds its market
Ontario, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador and most recently Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island have legislation banning texting with handheld devices while driving.
As well, many states in the United States and most European Union member countries have similar bans. Exceptions are generally made for hands-free devices, however some groups, such as the Canadian Automobile Association, want to expand the ban to include hands-free devices which they consider just as distracting to drivers as hand-held cellphones. The use of either hand-held or hands-free devices while driving is already illegal in Japan, Israel, Portugal and Singapore. Currently, no U.S. state completely bans both hand-held and hands-free cellphones.
Voice on the Go, which has been in development since 2004, came on the market in 2009. It's privately funded, with development money coming from company's founding employees, their board of directors and advisers as well as a number of high net worth individuals. All are shareholders. Voice on the Go is available to consumers and professionals, as well as telecommunications carriers and resellers, in seven languages and in 60 countries around the world.
The company offers three partner programs: a co-branded option with a reseller program where Voice on the Go provides the client with a co-branded landing site; a customized program where companies can add voice-enabled services to their existing product set or service, including support for multiple languages; and programs for carriers of all sizes that include Voice on the Go as an additional calling feature or bundled into a value pack that can be integrated into their platform.
The biggest challenge in developing Voice on the Go was creating high quality voice recognition and making it so that customers wouldn't need training to use it.
"Voice recognition systems generally get a bad rap," Mr. McLeod says. "When people call big phone companies or airlines for service, they've often had such a bad experience [with voice recognition]that they fear or loathe voice systems. Getting it right so that it was natural and making customers comfortable with the voice technology was key."
Getting attention in a crowded marketplace was another challenge since there are so many applications available, but getting into the app stores themselves was easy due to positive online reviews from their customer base and reviewers.
"It's a really noisy environment in the mobile world so you just have to get your name out there to be known," Mr. McLeod says. "Social networks and good reviews helped a lot."
The biggest challenges the company encountered in going global were technical - working with carriers and carrier networks around the world - and language. "When you do a translation, you've also got jargon in each country - Quebec French and Parisian French, Latin American Spanish and Spain's Spanish," Mr. McLeod says. "So getting all the nuances and jargons of those languages and getting them to market was quite an undertaking."
With five billion cellphones in the world, Mr. McLeod says he's not worried about competitors since there are so many potential customers. They've had hundreds of thousands of downloads and are rapidly approaching the million mark. Some of their most loyal users include the visually impaired.
"We designed it for drivers, but we also have a small following among the visually impaired," Mr. McLeod says. "Even if they've never had a computer, they can speak and listen to their e-mails and communicate with friends and family. All they need to do is use their cellphone and talk into it."