While it may feel cathartic at times, screaming at your computer monitor in blind rage rarely does much in terms of actual productivity. The problem is the silly thing simply can’t hear you.
Intent on creating a more effective means of verbal communication between the computer and its user, Wildfire Communications Inc. has created a new addition to its Wildfire Electronic Assistant family called Enterprise. The product is scheduled to be released sometime next year.
The Wildfire Electronic Assistant organizes a user’s phone book, messages, incoming calls, schedule and other information using voice-recognition technology. When a user accesses Wildfire over the phone, the electronic assistant greets the caller in a friendly voice, interprets spoken requests and gives verbal responses.
Wildfire Gold was the first-generation, expensive, stand-alone version sold as a premium, full-featured service to the high-end vertical market.
The next step came in the form of Network Wildfire, which allows phone carriers to incorporate an adapted version of the speech-recognition and computer telephony integration technology into their networks. Carriers offer it as a premium service to their customers. Currently, Orange plc and Pacific Bell Mobile Services are conducting extensive tests of the service on their networks.
Enterprise Wildfire is an all-digital office telephony solution that connects any phone directly to a corporate local area network. The call then travels over Ethernet to a server running Wildfire software, and from the server through an ISDN PRI card to a PBX or directly to the telephone network.
The point is to better integrate the Wildfire network with the user’s LAN-based information via the Enterprise product.
“People have an expectation that their modes of communication will be connected,” said Robert Mechaley, president and chief executive officer of Wildfire. These modes primarily include voice and data. Because people demand voice applications more than data, Wildfire decided to make voice applications the vehicle to transfer data.
To effectively integrate data with voice, the active technology must exist within the data stream, Mechaley said, and Enterprise is the link between the desktop data and the telephone. It is not a CTI product, but an application running atop a CTI infrastructure.
Network Wildfire places the technology inside a phone network, where mobile users may take full advantage of it, whereas Enterprise Wildfire places the technology inside a company’s LAN, where the e-mail address, appointment book and other useful information is stored.
To access e-mail using the Network product alone, it must be sent to a dedicated address that Wildfire Network can access, which is a different address from the office computer. Enterprise Wildfire instead reads the e-mail sent to the office computer and serves as the gateway to make that information accessible by a wireless phone using the Network service, so no second address is necessary.
“Whether on a computer or a mobile phone, the assistant knows everything your network knows,” Mechaley said. “It unburdens you to have to figure what you have to do as a user. Too much of what’s out there now requires you to have to figure out the parts. Our goal is for you to get useful [information] according to your needs without having to figure that out. You just push a button and things happen.”
The point, he continued, is to make the process as easy as possible.
“The difference is between the user going through hoops or using a simple and intuitive device,” he said. “A keystone for us here is that we’re always very, very focused on making things simple, easy, approachable and intuitive.”
Recent investments by Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. point to Enterprise’s potential in the desktop arena. “It means we’re associated with the right people,” Mechaley said.
