An Optus representative, speaking after communications and Internet Service Provider eKit launched an e-mail to telephone service a week ago, said the telco viewed the market as not ready for such an offering.
"It's still a little bit too early for Optus," the Optus spokesperson said. "We are looking at this technology with interest to see how applicable it is to Australia, but we have no plans to offer it in the near future."
eKit executives begged to differ. "The [two-week] trial went well and we're pleased with the full launch," Andrew McDonald, chief operating officer of eKit told ZDNet Australia. "We've seen a lift of 30 percent in voicemail message minutes since we introduced the service."
However, McDonald admitted a previous attempt by eKit's to offer email via the telephone wasn't very successful. He blamed the failure on the email filtering system that had to be set up. "Customers didn't use it because of the added complexity," he said.
Under the latest system, customers use a touchtone system to listen to e-mail, and hear the subject line to decide whether they want to listen to the message or not. The e-mail is then read out utilising a text to speech program licensed from Appen, who developed an Australian accent for speech synthesis.
McDonald said eKit's business is designed to keep travellers in touch, and he expects interest in the technology to grow, especially from people who are travelling overseas and are not able to get to an Internet café. "A lot of our partners who are travel companies have expressed an interest," he said.
Analysts in the US say e-mail to telephone technology hasn't been that successful, in part because of the various symbols, typos, foreign words and other unusual characters that can appear in e-mail.
"I haven't seen a whole lot of successes because listening to e-mail has a lot of gotchas," said Alan Reiter, president of an industry consulting company, Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing. He said people writing emails do not have voicemail in mind. "That is a problem."
Alorie Gilbert contributed to this report
