The SMS Wizard is provided by text and voice experts, Telsis, which routes Vodafone's text traffic. It automatically interprets natural language questions and gives automated responses.
Following a six-month internal trial, the Spanish operator plans to launch the service later this year as part of a three-tier strategy to reduce the load in call centres and improve customer service. UK operators are in talks to follow suit.
Tony Hill, product and marketing director of Telsis, said: "We hope that UK operators will follow the lead and launch something similar this year, but there are no firm plans as yet."
Telsis chairman, Jeff Wilson, said: "SMS Wizard offers tremendous benefits for the network operator, particularly in terms of cost reduction and enhanced quality of service. We are delighted that Telefonica Moviles has chosen to lead the world and roll out the benefits of SMS Wizard to its customers."
Answers to questions are derived from an internal knowledge base and from external systems such as customer databases.
The service comes after, AQA, the SMS directory service for mobiles, was launched this April by mobile telecoms and information service firm, IssueBits, generating automated and human responses to SMS queries. A new service, 82ASK, which launches this month, provides a similar service.
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