We don’t talk about killer apps too much these days, but if you ask me, it should be pretty top of mind for service providers. Voice is a double-edged sword for service providers – most of their businesses are built around it, but with the advent of VoIP, it’s become a commodity, and in many cases, a race to zero. So, what’s a carrier to do? Sure, everyone is shifting to data – Web browsing, video calling, etc., but more than anything, people like to talk. With voice getting cheaper by the day, it becomes harder to see how it can be profitable again.

Well, it certainly can be, and my columns focused on the platform play concept have touched on some great examples. This column continues the theme with a couple of recent announcements that should give carriers hope that not all is lost with voice. As with most successful applications, making voice a killer app involves identifying a real problem and providing a practical solution.

Mobivox and Jajah are two companies that are doing just that, and I want to highlight them to show that voice can be much more than an everyday conversation. Last month, Mobivox launched PL, their voice activated platform. There’s nothing really new there, but Mobivox has a lot of speech recognition expertise and is using it to differentiate them from the pack. We all know how hot mobile VoIP is now, and for good reason. There is a great market opportunity for making mobile calls less costly, but ultimately, it’s another race to zero, and only so many players will be successful.

Far fewer are chasing voice activated telephony, and Mobivox has identified some real pain points that carriers can address with their platform. First and foremost is mobile telephony on the road. States such as California have enacted legislation around hands-free cell phone use while driving, and this trend is sure to continue across the U.S. and Canada. It’s not a stretch to say that many Americans pretty much consider this a right, and would find such an imposition a major nuisance regardless of the safety issues. Short of the auto insurers tying premium rates to cell phone usage, enforcing this type of legislation will be the only way to make our roads safer.

Rather than risking a fine, Mobivox offers subscribers a practical solution, as voice-activated telephony allows for hands-free calling and is quite easy to use. Mobivox may not be the first company to offer this capability, but they do it very well, and are coming to market at a time where it truly is needed. This is a case where carriers would not really be offering a new service, but they are adding value and endearing themselves to subscribers by promoting safe practices. Let’s not forget today’s fragile economy, where people generally favor caution over taking risks.

Maybe this doesn’t get you very excited, and that’s fine, but Mobivox is looking well beyond voice activated telephony. By thinking of PL as a platform for voice enabled communications, service providers will recognize that telephony is just the beginning. Once subscribers become comfortable using voice activated telephony, they will find it easy – and intuitive – to apply this to other forms of everyday communications. Think text messaging, think SMS, think email, think conferencing, think updating your contact lists on the fly. In some ways telephony is more complex than these applications, and adding them is not a big leap for Mobivox. I suspect it won’t be difficult to find subscribers who would prefer voice activated messaging to typing things out on a tiny keyboard – especially while driving.

Mobivox may not be doing a lot of Web 3.0 or voice mashups here, but they are doing something that carriers understand. They are adding value to voice, and helping make it more of a killer app, with services that subscribers would be willing to pay money for.

Jajah is of the same mind, and I have written about them before. They are featured in this column for two reasons, one of which relates to Mobivox. Not long after Mobivox launched their PL platform, they announced a partnership with Jajah where their voice activated telephony service would be offered by Jajah, branded as Concierge. This move provides important validation for Mobivox, as Jajah sees how PL adds value to their own platform, and given Jajah’s strong momentum, will help accelerate voice enabled telephony as a bona fide value add for service providers.

The second reason is the concurrent launch of Babel, which takes things in a whole other direction, but is very much tied to speech recognition. Babel is basically a voice-based translation service, where your speech is translated into another language. This can be a very valuable tool for business travelers who need to communicate with customers where language is a natural barrier.

At present, Babel is really a voice interpreter, where one party speaks into the phone, and the other party waits to hear the message fed back in their native language. Real time translation capability is not here yet, but given the complexity of translating across languages, this is an encouraging starting point.

Fittingly, Mandarin was the first language offered for Babel, which launched just before the Beijing Olympics. Aside from such a natural connection, Mandarin has become one of the most important languages in the business world, but at the same time, understood by very few outside of China. As such, the market opportunity is enormous, considering how much the world is rushing to do business with China today. And yes, other languages are in the works for this service, so this is just the beginning.

Again, Jajah’s Babel is not trying to reinvent telephony with innovative 3.0 services. They are simply doing things to make voice more valuable and communications more efficient. Skype (News - Alert) was founded on a similar philosophy, and gained them a huge global following in no time. Like Skype, Jajah is focused on some universal principals – make communications easy, simple and accessible to as many people as possible.

Companies like Skype have been successful by breaking down technological barriers to do this, and now Jajah is doing the same by breaking down more natural barriers – human language itself. Appropriately named, Babel can truly make the telephony pie bigger by enabling universal communication regardless of language. If you can think of a bigger killer app, I’d like to know what I’m missing.

INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO — the biggest and most comprehensive IP communications event of the year — is going on this week (September 16-18, 2008) in Los Angeles, California! The show features three valuable days of exhibits, conferences, and networking opportunities you can’t afford to miss. Be sure to check out TMCnet.com and blogs from Rich Tehrani, Greg Galitzine, and Tom Keating for news highlights from the show. See you there!