Bangalore: Engineers working at the Mumbai and Gurgaon development centres, of the United States-based roaming services provider, Roamware, have perfected a cost-effective technology to send short voice messages as easily as one sends short message service (SMS) text messages from a mobile phone now.

Unlike the voice mailbox option that many cell phone users in India can activate, when they are unable to accept an incoming call, Voice SMS can be used as a cheap and less intrusive option, to contact a person. A lot of words — and the emotion — can be packed into a 30 second or one minute Voice SMS: something that is painfully slow to achieve by tapping out a text message limited to 150 characters or so, said Avnish Chauhan, Roamware's San Jose (California)-based senior vice-president (engineering), during a telephonic briefing for The Hindu on Tuesday. It will be specially meaningful in galloping new telecom markets such as India, where many of the new subscribers in the rural areas, may not be comfortable with text-based messaging.

``This looks like being the Next Wave of value additions to the Mobile Phone,'' Mr. Chauhan said.

Just five years old, Roamware has created a niche for itself in the telecom tools arena with a number of products sharply focused on reducing the cost and hassle of roaming services, and currently serves 200 networks and 520 million users in 85 countries. Chief Executive Bobby Srinivasan adds: ``Voice SMS overcomes barriers of language, literacy and etiquette, without needing any additional infrastructure from the provider or any change to the mobile hand set.... `talk and listen' is any day a great improvement on ``type and read.''

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