I recently ran across a series of posts and a SpeechTEK magazine article about a new service currently in Private Beta called Fonolo.

The premise is definitively very interesting. What this Canadian start-up is attempting to do is to replicate the concept of bookmarking and deep linking (process of linking pages in the lower levels of a Web site from a home page – or other pages – to help search engines index them) so common these days on the web. What this means for a phone user is that they don’t need to get to the application’s “home page” (aka Main Menu) every time to then have to traverse the phone tree to reach a specific destination…

According to their founder’s pitch, the way it works is that you “bookmark” a spot deep inside a telephone’s system tree. To do this, you go to the Fonolo’s website, find the Company you need, review a transcription of their menu structure, find the spot you need and click on it. By doing that, they call the company for you, navigate the menu up to that specific spot and call you back so you can continue your transaction from that point on.

How do they know what systems look like? Well, as noted in the VoIP weblog, they seem to be using a combination of voice recognition and human editors to generate “maps” of the interactive voice response system.

Aside from the obvious privacy concerns a service like this might raise, the hottest one in my opinion is the service they refer to as “Intelligent Call History”. Since in reality all your calls start from their home page, they are attempting to become something like a Google of sorts for “phone sites”. What I mean by that is that they would keep track of all the interactions you’ve had with a certain company (regardless of the phone you used), along with the actual recordings of those conversations!

In the web world, we’re all familiar with how certain companies keep logs that track your web habits which could then be linked to your IP address. The biggest difference to me is that they mostly keep track of where you’ve been and where you’re going, but not of what’s happening when you are there… and in this case, since you’re using them as a bridge to connect to a Company, how can you be sure those recordings (which may contain account numbers, PINs, etc.) are kept safe and out of anybody’s reach?

Presumably the advantage of something like this is that in case of a dispute, you could play back a recording from the actual conversation and prove a certain transaction happened. But is this benefit really worth the risk? Particularly when it is known that once it becomes available to the public, it will be ad-supported.

On the other hand, they have also expressed that their ultimate goal is to craft partnerships with those companies Fonolo has mapped so that those companies can notify them “when they change or update their IVR” to the point where they hope companies will indeed send transcripts of their IVRs so they don’t have to be mapped anymore

Again, I definitively like the idea of empowering users and allowing them to accomplish their task in the most efficient way, but I think a system like this would be a much better fit for an actual device feature (similar to the GOOG411 dedicated button now present in some phones) – which you could turn on at the beginning of a call and stop once you reach the spot you want to “bookmark” so that in the future your phone would simply repeat the steps you followed and get you to that same spot. And of course, rather than finding more ways to patch user-unfriendly architectures, companies should be looking at fixing the root problem, which in the short term can be somewhat addressed via the deployment of more SayAnything/ SpeakFreely-type menus so callers can say what it is they need right at the beginning of an application…