Features

Cellphones can connect users to lots of information 

SAN FRANCISCO – Adam Burg used to lug his laptop computer to the mountains on his frequent skiing trips so he could log on to the Internet and check the latest weather reports. 

Now all he needs is his cellphone. 

With a phone call to a toll-free number, Burg, 27, simply asks for the latest weather report wherever he is and is told in a matter of seconds. 

If he wants to locate a nearby Chinese restaurant or find out what’s playing at nearby movie theaters, he can find that out too by just speaking a few words into the phone. 

Burg, a hard-driving technology worker, uses Tellme Networks, one of several free, voice-activated services known as “voice portals” that use voice recognition software to retrieve and translate information from the Internet. 

Taking their cues from spoken words, the services dispense stock quotes, horoscopes, driving directions, sports scores and other widely sought information over any telephone. 

“For a mobile person like me, it’s very useful,” Burg, of San Francisco, said before catching a flight to New York. “I already take my cellphone and Palm Pilot everywhere I go, so it’s nice not to have to haul my laptop, too, just so I can get on the Internet.” 

Tellme and rivals BeVocal and HeyAnita aren’t just designed to appeal to on-the-go, technology-savvy consumers. They also aim to attract the millions of people who aren’t computer literate. 

The services have become a valuable tool for blind people including Brent Bacome of Hanford, Calif., who finds it much easier to call BeVocal than to try to fetch information from the Web using special equipment that “reads” words aloud from a computer. 

“It’s been marvelous for me. It seems to understand me better than a lot of people do,” said Bacome, 47, a teacher’s aide who uses the portal for everything from news reports to locating the closest Starbucks coffee house. 

With an estimated 2 billion phones in use worldwide, building a voice portal seemed like a no-brainer to Tellme CEO Mike McCue, who helped popularize the Web browser as a vice president of technology at Netscape Communication. 

After leaving Netscape in early 1999, McCue, 33, invested more than $1 million of his Netscape nest egg and set out to develop an easily accessible information source that would be appealing to computer-adverse people — including his mother in Indianapolis, who he says now dials TellMe’s access number more frequently than he does. 

“Once you use it a few times, you quickly understand how easy it is,” said his mother, Lucy McCue Allan, 60. 

McCue’s mom isn’t the only one impressed with his company. Venture capitalists so far have invested $238 million in Mountain View-based Tellme. 

Although there remain far more Web surfers than voice portal pioneers, the service providers are quickly expanding their reach. 

Both Tellme and Sunnyvale-based BeVocal are accessible nationwide and provide business directories and driving directions that cover virtually the entire country. Tellme’s billboards are plastered on the sides of New York City buses. And it is developing plans to expand to Europe. 

Talking to a portal isn’t like having a normal conversation. The portals only recognize certain words. The limited vocabulary means users have to know each system’s keywords to navigate quickly. 

The voice portals also have trouble making out words in a noisy environment, or amid the static of a wireless phone. 

When talking on a clear phone line, the portals are fairly simple to use. Navigating around Tellme requires saying just one or two words, such as “driving directions,” or “restaurants,” and the voice prompts guide you the rest of the way. Get lost and the command “Tellme menu” takes you back to the auditory equivalent of a home page. 

Regular callers can also create a “favorites” list that makes it easy to go directly to specific information. 

As work continues on new software and applications, voice portals created for consumers and businesses are expected to become big business. 

The voice portal industry is expected to grow from $2 billion in 2000 to $12 billion in 2005, with a projected 128 million callers, according to the Kelsey Group. 

As privately held companies, the all-purpose portals don’t disclose how many people use their services. 

The Kelsey Group estimates users at slightly more than 1 million. Another 3 million are believed to use more specialized portal services that translate e-mail messages and perform other specific tasks. 

“There is still a lot of evolution that needs to take place,” said Kelsey analyst Mark Plakias. “A lot of what we are seeing now won’t be around in a few years. The portals today are where the Web was back in 1995.” 

The potential market for voice portals is spurring more Webmasters to encode the content on their sites with “Voice XML,” computer code that can be translated into English by voice browsers. 

Meantime, a San Francisco company, VocalPoint Technologies, has developed a technology that can read HTML, the computer code behind the Web, and convert it into voice applications for businesses that want to create their own portals. 

For now, Tellme and BeVocal are just trying to build a mass market of customers that will entice businesses to advertise on their services. 

Both portals are still in their infancy. Tellme’s phone lines opened in April 2000 and BeVocal began accepting calls in June 2000. 

Over the long haul, though, the companies hope to do much more than provide consumers with a new way to extract information from the Internet. Ultimately, they want to morph into the launching pad for the phone calls of the future. 

“We want to become ’Dialtone 2.0,”’ McCue said. 

In this scenario, voice portals essentially would supplant the telephone keypad for placing calls. 

Instead of punching in numbers to place a call, people simply would pick up a phone and announce the name of a person or business. Business calls might be answered by another automated system. 

As McCue sees it, this is the ultimate “killer application” for portals — free directory assistance that finds a business or person for a caller, then connects them. The company plans to make money from referral fees paid by businesses. 

It’s an ambitious game plan that the portal start-ups know they won’t be able to execute by themselves. 

Already, BeVocal has licensed its technology to wireless phone carriers Sprint and Qwest so they can provide voice portals to their subscribers. 

Even more wireless phone alliances are in the works, said C. Mikael Berner, CEO of BeVocal, which is backed by $46 million in venture capital. 

“We strongly believe every wireless carrier in the U.S. will have some kind of voice (portal) by the end of this year,” said Berner, whose company also operates its own publicly accessible portal. 

Tellme’s backers include AT&T, which invested $60 million. Eventually, says McCue, his company may well end up a business partner with Yahoo and America Online, which last fall introduced telephone portals of their own.