<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div>That article about the ** thing is just a gimmick. Basically it's a speed-dial-by-name. If you a contact list you can already dial-by-name.<br><br>But Ron's comment about email addresses reminded me of something...<br>
<br>A few years back we talked about the challenge direct "dialing" people with the keypad who don't have a phone number. There have been a few proposals in this area specifically things like ENUM.</div><div>
<br></div>What I've come to realize in the intervening time is that this problem is already well on it's way to solving itself and it's actually not that complicated.<br><br></div>Step 1. Forget about the numeric keypad as the problem. With the proliferation of smartphones, just about everyone effectively dials by name. They lookup a contact and then press "call". On my smartphone, when I touch the "phone" button, it doesn't come up with a keypad, it comes up with a list of searchable contacts. I can't even remember the last time I called someone by punching in numbers using the keypad. So while I may not be typical, it does prove that it's possible to get rid of they keypad as the primary input device.<br>
<br>With deskphones it's the same thing. If you look at Microsoft Lync, even the desk
phone is integrated with your address book. I just
start spelling the name with the keypad and typically within 3 key presses
it's narrowed the list down to my intended contact (It automatically matches the name or the phone number as I type it in).<br><br></div>Step 2. Adopt a standard for direct sip-to-sip calling. Microsoft (yes Microsoft!) has already solved this problem with an elegant and simple solution; DNS SRV. It works like this: take an email address and look up the sip service for my domain using DNS SRV, then call that destination directly bypassing the PSTN.<br>
<br></div>So lets take this as a practical example. Lets say I have a contact in my address book "Mike Smith". I probably have his name, email and phone number. If I want to call Mike, I look up his contact and touch "call". In the background my voice application (my "phone") does DNS SRV lookup for SIP using his email address. If it returns a result, I "dial" that and talk to Mike. If it fails, I fall-back to a traditional PSTN/Cell call.<br>
</div><div><br></div><div>John</div></div>