One of the underlying technologies driving the exploding call monetization space is speech to text processing. I keep telling people that the opportunity will only grow as speech recognition technologies themselves do. And voice processing is an area that’s young and naturally improves over time.

Towards that end, Ifbyphone announced a partnership with speech automation specialist LumenVox. Ifbyphone will plug this technology directly into its Voice360 hosted IVR platform which should enable some vertical integration advantages; and make the overall package more effective and holistic.

“In our industry today, so much emphasis is placed on call data and analytics,” Steve Griffiths, SVP Marketing and Product Strategy told me. “This is a critical component of our solution, but an often overlooked fact is that the quality of the call experience — what actually happens on the phone — must be top notch as well. The best reporting in the world does not do much good if your customers are wrestling with hard to use IVRs and phone trees.”

Griffith’s comments resonate, given the volume of calls to businesses coming from mobile — 72 billion annually by 2018 according to our forecast. That increases the uncertain variables under which calls happen, including reception, wind, background noise, etc.. LumenVox will alleviate that.

This is just the latest in call monetization, which is one of the most underrated areas of advertising media and technology today. The call is the new click, as we keep saying. For more, see the blog posts and white papers we wrote on the topic this year. There’s much more where that came from in 2015.