Warwick Valley Telephone Communications”™ new “voice to text” product may be the answer to a texter”™s prayer.
The new technology is known as the Talking Digital Assistant.Â
“It”™s for people who want to send an e-mail but are away from a computer or don”™t have e-mail capability, especially if they are on the road a lot,” said Karol Perczack, WVT”™s marketing manager, who gave HVBiz a demonstration on how Talking Digital Assistant enables the user to send e-mails and receive them by talking into a headset.
Using a special call-in number, you can download your entire e-mail address book into its system. All functions are done by voice command. And TDA demonstrated a remarkably good “ear” for the spoken word.Â
After speaking your password, prompts enable the user to send an e-mail to anyone in their address book, go into their own inbox and “read” e-mails as you drive, as well as being able to forward them on to another person. “Every function you can perform with Outlook you can perform with your cell phone with TDA,” said Perczak.
Benefits? All you need is a cell phone, no particular brand. You don”™t have to pull over to compose; TDA uses your words and converts them into writing to the recipient. The best part? No police officer pulling you over for trying to text while driving because your hands never leave the wheel.Â
Perczak says another nice feature of TDA is the price. “You are billed at the voice rate, not data rate, which can really add up.” And you don”™t have to be a WVT customer to take advantage of the service. No matter who your cell phone carrier is, TDA is available to people outside of their regular franchise base as a separate service.
Thanks to TDA, Warwick Valley Telephone Communications has “expanded” its customer base as far north as Kingston and south into Westchester and Bergen County in New Jersey. “Our Main Street office in Warwick is our only ”˜brick and mortar”™ building,” said company President Duane Albro. “But thanks to TDA, we are able to fan out all over the Hudson Valley, even into New Jersey and Pennsylvania.”
WVTC is one of approximately 20 independent phone companies in the state. “There aren”™t many of us,” said Albro, “and that”™s why it is so important to stay ahead of the learning curve when it comes to introducing new technology and making sure we can offer our franchise customers the same quality of service and packages for residential and business customers that our competition can and offer products like TDA Â to those out of our franchise area.”
Albro is confident that the dedication of WVTC”™s 93 employees, including himself, will soon turn red ink into black. Â The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, designed to protect shareholders from fraud, made the required oversights and record-keeping a very costly experience for the small telecommunications company, which is publicly traded on NASDAQ under the symbol WWVY.
“We realize Sarbanes-Oxley was intended to protect the public, but the cost to implement it is so exorbitant, especially for a small company like ours, that our shareholders”™ earnings dropped as a result. Adding to SOX implementation and compliance, our company”™s longtime CEO, Herb Gareiss, came down with leukemia, so 2005 and 2006 were very tough years for us,” said Albro, who eventually took over for Gareiss.
Albro says core business is not profitable at present, but the company is working on turning that around. “We do get profits from the Orange-Poughkeepsie Partnership which we are a member of, and it does sustain us. And we are working to bring our core business up. By being able to expand outside of our franchise area with products like TDA, it”™s helped us grow our business. We can offer all the services the big companies can; we”™re just a bit smaller. There aren”™t too many companies where you can call and get the CEO on the phone.”
