A couple of days back, fellow blogger and friend Alec told us that his company iotum started beta testing of their first offering relevance engine. In case you have not read about it it collects information about your reachability status and using historical data, makes a decision on the importance of an incoming call and directs it appropriately. Once this basic capability is available, one can envision, as they also suggest, them enhancing the engine with AI capability for handling the proper way of handling an incoming call. If you live in 514, 416, 613, 905, or 519 area codes you may be eligible to sign up for the beta.
They need to restrict the trial to these area codes because the Class 5 switch and its call processing software need to consult the relevance engine and that mean cooperation from the carrier is needed. They can extend the trial to VoIP providers. Given the dearth of meaningful applications in the VoIP domain one would think VoIP providers will be more than willing. After all isn’t FWD billed as a “community lab”?
All these logistical and business difficulties suggest that we have not really moved away from the PSTN paradigm. But a device like PhoneGnome allows us to do just that. Since PG behaves like a Class 5 switch AND a SIP Proxy, we could make the PG consult the Relevance Engine is consulted. Given that iotum and PG are known to each other and that they are related through Andy, it is very likely that they may be working on this as we speak.
Posted by aswath at November 18, 2005 07:01 AM