I think we’re beginning to see a growing influx of Asian entrepreneurs looking at problems outside of Asia to solve. Smart Voicemail is a startup along these lines that tackles a problem you just don’t see in Asia. The startup focuses on automating voicemails for people in the USA and Europe. It’s only something we see in developed nations that didn’t leapfrog straight into cellphones and texting. In the USA, people used to receive voicemails on their answering machines. Just the thought of that old technology brings a wave of nostalgia for the 90s. Today, receiving voicemails has passed into American cellphones, but the technology hasn’t seen much innovation. That’s where Smart Voicemail wants to go.
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The Indian startup, which showcased at Techcrunch Disrupt this past week, aims to basically make voicemail smarter. These days, most peoples’ voicemails include a standard message that they recorded, and it only changes when they do so manually. Smart Voicemail allows users to update their voicemail like a Facebook status message or a tweet. This allows for much more communicative messaging, especially when you’re busy.
So, for example, if I’m in a business meeting, I can set my voicemail to say that I’m in a meeting, just by clicking on a status update on the app. By clicking on that status, it will automatically talk to the voicemail system from the carrier and input my new voicemail message. Essentially, anyone calling me in the meeting would be greeted with a voicemail that says, “Minh is in a meeting right now, please leave a message and he’ll get back to you in two hours.”
I immediately have more control over my communication. But it’s pretty niche, right? Well, Rama Prasanna Chella Muthu, founder and CEO of Smart Voicemail, says he knows exactly which market really needs his service.
“We’re going to target the small- and medium-sized business people who are always on the go between meetings and trips but don’t want to be impolite to people who want to reach them urgently,” he says.
When I asked him what he thinks about attacking markets that don’t have voicemail, namely everybody outside of North America and Europe – nations that didn’t transition from landlines into cellphones – he said it’s possible that voicemail will come to them in the future when the telcos realize the benefits. I guess we’ll just have to see. But today, Smart Voicemail is solely focused on the US market.
Rama Prasanna, who has a background in robotics and machine learning (as you can see in this slideshare of the interesting robots he’s designed) at Microsoft, says that Smart Voicemail fits right into what he’s been doing for the past decade. Smart Voicemail is itself a product of machine learning, especially considering the product has to adapt to diverse status requests and interact with the carrier’s system.
This article by Anh-Minh Do originally appeared on Tech in Asia, a Burn Media publishing partner.
