voice

Internet Protocol telephony player Vonage is still hanging on, but the company, which has been mired in a nasty patent battle with Verizon Communications, is teetering on disaster as it struggles to sign up new customers.

Vonage said Thursday during its second-quarter conference call that it has completed the necessary work-arounds for the Verizon patents that a court found it infringes, but the legal drama has cost the company dearly in terms of recruiting new customers.

Jeffrey Citron, the company's interim CEO, told investors and analysts the company had substantially completed deployments of work-arounds for two of the three … Read more

What do Ashton Kutcher and voice over IP technology have in common?

Kutcher, best known for his role on That '70s Show and MTV's reality show Punk'd, is "creative director" for a Silicon Valley start-up called Ooma, which has developed a device that will allow users to make free VoIP calls to any phone in the U.S.

The company, which has $27 million in funding, officially announced itself Thursday.

Unlike Vonage, which requires users pay a monthly flat rate for domestic calling, or Skype, which charges users a low-cost fee to make or accept calls … Read more

SunRocket, a voice over IP provider, told employees on Monday that it's shutting down, according to several reports from former employees.

The company's Web site is still up, but its customer service line has this recording: "We are no longer taking customer service or sales calls. Goodbye." An internal memo from Sonya Jefferson, director of routing and carrier services for SunRocket was posted on the GigaOm blog earlier Monday.

"Unfortunately this email contains very bad news. We have just been informed that any and all last ditch efforts to keep operations running as well as … Read more

Six months after its official unveiling at 3GSM World Congress, the HP iPaq 510 Voice Messenger is finally shipping here in the States. The voice-centric Windows Mobile 6 smart phone features some advanced voice-command functions that let you perform a number of tasks, such as making calls, opening applications, and composing and sending e-mails, just by the sound of your voice. The iPaq 510 is available unlocked through HP, with prices starting at $319.99.

At this rate, the smartest technology in the household won't be the computer or the entertainment center, but the massage chair. We've already seen versions with features ranging from multimedia equipment to lie-detecting sensors, after all, and now we have a chair that will cater to your kneads by voice command.

Luxurylaunches says the "ROBO Chair" will customize your position up to 170 degrees while working you over with a "3D roller mechanism," whatever that is. There are tons of massage chairs on the market, so why is this one being featured on a … Read more

Users of Google's free 411 service (1-800-GOOG-411), can now get maps sent straight to their phone. Once you've found your listing, just say "map it" to get a text message containing the address and a link to its location on Google Maps mobile. Users also get a link to turn-by-turn driving directions.

Since writing about the service in early April, I've become a regular user. Nine times out of 10, it works like a charm, while occasionally the voice recognition can and will fail--and when it does, it's often quite amusing.

If you're … Read more

The next round in the ongoing patent infringement saga between Verizon and Vonage will begin on Monday when the companies present their oral arguments to the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.

Vonage is arguing a few things. First, it believes that it got a bum deal even before the original trial started. Vonage argues that during the markman hearing, or the hearing in which terms of the patents were defined, several of the terms were defined too broadly. This hurt Vonage in the trial because it was this broad definition that the jury used to determine whether or … Read more

No, you're not going crazy (necessarily) if you find yourself imagining that your phone is vibrating in one of your pockets. Or, if you are, you're far from alone.

That's the shorthand conclusion of a recent USA Today article that reports a phenomenon dubbed "phantom vibration syndrome," also known as "vibranxiety." So what causes this irritating ghost ring, anyway?

"You come armed with this template that leads you to be attentive to sensations that represent a cellphone vibrating," Jeffrey Janata, director of the behavioral medicine program at University Hospitals in Cleveland, … Read more

One of the presenters at yesterday's Launch Silicon Valley event yesterday was Fix8, which makes technology that puts animated avatars on top of Webcam videos.

We've seen this before -- Webcam vendors like Logitech, Creative, and Microsoft have similar software that lets you overlay characters on top of your video stream. The stream can then be read by products like Skype and Eyejot (review). Fix8, though, works with any Webcam, and the company is trying to develop a more serious business around this technology. While the software is free and lets you do fun things (see video clip … Read more