The Learnosity platform and hosted applications have been deployed in major governmental education projects in Ireland and Australia; others are under consideration in more than ten other countries. In practice, students dial in on Voxbone numbers, enter their student IDs, and meet fellow students of their subject language on conference calls, where they conduct assigned role-playing conversations.

Teachers subsequently grade these conversations through a Web interface that clearly indicates whose voice is who's. The system allows a few teachers to assess many students anywhere in the world.

One of Learnosity's major goals is, for example, to use Voxbone numbers to enable native speakers of French to reach native Italian speakers affordably, taking turns switching teacher-student roles. In another application, Learnosity tests are offered to call centres to assess job seekers' suitability for customer-service work.

Gavin Cooney, Learnosity CEO, says that simple scale and economy dictated their choice of mobile phones as the primary user device: "We can't provide every student in a country with a laptop, broadband connection, and headsets, but we can easily put a phone in the hands of every student. In fact they already have one in most cases."

"As for teachers", he continues "they don't have to book computer facilities within the school; they just ask the students to take out their phones and dial in. This removes a significant barrier to entry."

Voxbone's DIDs (direct-inward-dial numbers) and network go hand in hand with that simplicity and economy. "Using Voxbone allows us to deal with only one telco", adds Cooney. "We can use the same infrastructure to allow students as far apart as Ireland and Australia to learn using our system. And we can immediately offer our product in 46 countries-”including markets that we never would have dreamed of approaching so soon, such as Pakistan, South and Central America, and Eastern Europe."