Making it easier for cell phone users to communicate with increasingly popular text-messaging technology, a New Delhi, India-based telecom service provider says it’s offering an IVR-based method to subscribers.

 

Officials at Tata Teleservices Limited say their so-called “VoiceSMS” service, powered in part by Kirusa and Qualcomm, means users can send texts directly from their stored contacts in the phonebook, cutting out the need to remember any number or to key in complicated numbers prefixed by a star.

 

According to Pankaj Sethi, Tata’s president of corporate services, the company is the first telecom operator in the world to offer voice-powered texts on a BREW platform that facilitates sending Voice SMS directly from the stored contacts in the phonebook.

 

“Even in the concept stage, our target was clear: that we would make it easy to send Voice SMS without having to remember and type in phone numbers,” Sethi said. “Our BREW application and the (asterisk) dialing option for non-BREW handsets will provide users ease of use, simplicity, personalization and utmost reliability.”

 

Texting is on the rise, industry experts say.

 

As TMCnet has reported, text-messaging and the mobile Web will become core components of advertising within five years, according to one expert from a Reading, England-based messaging company that provides communication solutions for more than 300 network operators and service providers worldwide.

 

Oswin Eleonora (News - Alert), senior vice president at Acision, LLC, told TMCnet in an interview that text messaging is poised to evolve as a technology in its own right and become a fundamental piece of all advertising.

 

“We expect text and mobile Web to become core to the advertising market in five years,” Eleonora told TMCnet in an interview. “That means that they will be fundamental to all advertising, rather than the ‘additional’ or ‘new’ channel that they represent today.”

 

If there’s one group that’s been looking at the potential of text messaging, it’s Acision (News - Alert). The company serves more than 1.5 billion consumers in 135 nations, while delivering more than half of the world’s text and multimedia messages and serving three-quarters of all video-mail users.

 

TMCnet also reported here on the use of text messaging as mainstream communications among mobile phone users – about 42 percent of consumers use their mobile phones to text as much or more than they do to make calls, one survey finds. Some have called for global text messaging revenues to double to $165 billion by 2011.

 

Officials at Tata are counting on the technology’s rise.

 

Sethi said the new service’s launch is part of a strategy to provide next-generation value-added services to subscribers in both the pre-paid and post-paid segments.

 

“By introducing this service, we have extended a user-friendly and cost-effective mode of communication to our customers so that they can communicate with their loved ones with ease,” Sethi said.