InformationWeek

March 13, 2000

Printer ready

Data At The Sound Of Your Voice
Software lets mobile users access information from Web and apps over the telephone

By Paul McDougall

Related links from our sister publications:

TechWeb IBM Says Voice-Based Security's Two Years Off (1/25/00)

Electronic Buyer's News Toshiba DSPs to incorporate speech-recognition software (1/10/00)

TechEncyclopedia

Send Us Your Feedback

s the market for voice-activated applications ready to take off? Lucent Technologies Inc. and startup Conita Technologies Inc. say so. Last week, Lucent unveiled PhoneBrowser, which lets telephone users access the Web through voice commands and receive content via recorded audio or synthesized text-to-speech. And Conita delivered its Personal Virtual Assistant, software that lets mobile workers dial in to an application server using a telephone and verbally communicate with E-mail, customer-relationship management, and contact programs.

PhoneBrowser, which is being developed as a new business by Lucent's New Ventures Group, will recognize and convert to text any HTML content, though it isn't compatible with the Extensible Markup Language. PhoneBrowser runs on Lucent's Speech Solutions server, which customers can run in-house or have PhoneBrowser host for them. Dave Stahl, director of new ventures for Lucent, says "the killer application for this is transportation, whether it's fleet owners or individual motorists."

DriveThere.com in St. Louis has been testing the software for a service that lets motorists dial in to its Web site, using a cell phone, to hear turn-by-turn directions. "We have to do very little to our content to make it compatible with PhoneBrowser," says DriveThere.com CEO Allen Cohen. PhoneBrowser pricing hasn't been set.

Personal Virtual Assistant runs on Windows NT or 2000. It's priced at $40,000 per port; each port supports as many as 80 users. A connector for Microsoft Exchange is fully integrated with Exchange and the Outlook client so users can call in for messages and contact updates. It works via the Component Object Model interface and a telephony interface to voice-messaging and PBX systems.

Text-to-voice apps may represent the Web's next frontier. They let "mobile workers connect with their data in a way that's low-cost and more reliable, at least for now, than wireless Web devices," says analyst Jen DiMarzio at Summit Strategies.

Back to This Week's Issue
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page