Voicemail it seems is becoming quite the in thing. Apple had revolutionised voicemail with it’s visual voicemail, then Google released their Google Voice service allow users to take control of all their phone numbers and have advanced voicemail options. Now, there is a new major player to the game.

Ribbit, the “Internet Phone Company”, has recently launched Ribbit Mobile in beta guise for US users.  WillINeedIt.com delves under the hood of this new cloud-based telephony service.

Introduction

The idea behind Ribbit Mobile is to be able to control your mobile calls and voicemail from your browser (and soon from the iPhone).

To enable these features, you first have to configure conditional call-forwarding (CCF) settings on your mobile.  This is so that when someone calls you on your mobile and you either don’t answer or divert it, the Ribbit platform can take the call and route it accordingly.  This won’t work if you’re on pay-as-you-go (in the UK at least).  It doesn’t have to be a mobile, any device that has CCF capabilities can.

Voicemail

If a call goes unanswered, Ribbit takes over and the transition from voice into data begins.   The call is recorded and saved in your voicemail storage area.  This is another example of visual voicemail (al la iPhone).  However, as well as browsing through and playing back voicemails, they are also transcribed to text using PhoneTag.

There are two flavours of transcription, one is “automated” and one is “business grade” which uses real people to transcribe.  The example in the screen shot used the automated service and as you can see, it’s far from perfect (it should be “hello there, this is a test message for Ribbit Mobile”).  The business grade version will no doubt cost more but should be more reliable overall.  However, having real people transcribing voicemails containing confidential information is probably highly undesirable.

Softphone

Before calls go to voicemail, users have the option of taking the call on the web via a softphone.  This softphone can also make outbound calls on behalf of the mobile.  The CCF in the setup phase mentioned earlier is also used as a means to verify user association with the mobile.  This enables the softphone to use the mobile’s calling line identity, thus becoming the mobile itself.  Any device that is configured using CCF to Ribbit can take advantage of this.

Caller ID 2.0

Every technology is jumping on the social media bandwagon and Ribbit Mobile is no exception.  In the telephony world, this is known as “Caller ID 2.0″.

This kind of technology builds metadata around a user by connecting to social sites they are registered to, building up additional contexts around users in address books, voicemails and during calls.  3  recently released the INQ in the UK to customers, which does the same thing.

Let’s say someone has left you a voicemail and they are on Facebook.  You can see what they’re up to and their profile picture when reading/hearing the voicemail.  The idea is that the additional information could help you determine how to action the voicemail (e.g. do I call them back?)

Call Routing

Ribbit Mobile also acts as a call-routing application, but only if you’re primary inbound device (e.g. the mobile) is unanswered or diverted.  You can configure more inbound devices as mentioned before, but that means more numbers to manage with your contacts.  A single “virtual” number would solve this.

You can configure a number of devices to route calls to (outbound).  Not only can you use physical phones, a number of clients capable of receiving voice can be setup too.  This is achieved by the various gateways Ribbit has to other platforms.  Clients include Skype and GoogleTalk.  Instant messaging devices such as MSN can also be configured to IM you when you have an incoming call.  At the time of writing this, the beta is a bit flaky and none of the clients tested appeared to receive calls.

Alerts

As well as receiving calls on other devices, alerts for missed calls and voicemails can be sent to them too.  The format varies depending on the device but alerts include: Voicemail as an mp3/WAV E-mail attachment, transcription of the voicemail to SMS/E-mail and missed call alerts.

Summary

In conclusion, there is a lot that Ribbit Mobile offers out of the box for a beta. There is room for improvement but it’s a good start. Another play Ribbit has is much of the functionality mentioned above is going to be exposed via APIs. This allows developers to develop their own cloud telephony applications with their own look-and-feel. They can then sell the application on, with Ribbit taking a slice of the revenue generated from usage.

The gauntlet is thrown to Google Voice….