Roamware has launched Voice SMS capability that combines the speed, efficiency and economy of SMS with the ubiquity and accuracy of voice communications over mobile networks.

As the world's most widely used messaging format, SMS is forecasted to be worth $50 billion by 2010. Roamware has built on this popularity by enhancing the power of SMS as a communications tool. Roamware's Voice SMS provides a non-intrusive "Talk and Listen" messaging mechanism that allows subscribers to deposit and exchange short peer-to-peer audio messages in near real time, or to deposit voice messages for convenient collection by the recipient. Traditional SMS is used both to notify the recipient and provide an access route to collect the voice message.

Bobby Srinivasan, chief executive officer, Roamware, said, "This is 'talk and listen' as an alternative to 'type and read'. Voice SMS overcomes issues of language, literacy and regional etiquette, opening up new revenue streams without any additional investment in either infrastructure or handset design."

According to company sources, the service will appeal to users who are
more likely to use messaging services than conduct real time
conversations. Voice SMS provides the best of both worlds. It is more
cost-effective and discreet than voicemail, and more expressive than SMS.

Voice message deposit and retrieval is aided by multilingual IVR prompts. Sent and received Voice SMS messages can be stored and repeatedly retrieved by subscribers, who can play, pause and delete messages, as well as link together all messages in the same 'conversation'.