General Magic Inc. and Advanced Recognition Technologies Inc. both made advancements last week in the voice recognition world.
First, General Magic announced it received a $6 million investment from Internet portal company Excite@Home. The two also formed a technology relationship to use General Magic ‘s magicTalk voice user interface in Excite@Home’s new Excite Voicemail service.
The investment came in the form of non-voting, non-redeemable shares of series E preferred stock, plus a warrant to buy up to $1 million of additional series E stock. General Magic said it plans to use the funds to further develop its voice-enabled services.
Excite Voicemail sends voice and fax messages to users’ existing e-mail accounts, and uses the magicTalk platform to give users instructions on how to do so, the company said. According to the agreement, General Magic will host the Excite Voicemail service at its recently expanded Network Operations Center. Users will sign up for the service at the Excite@Home Web site, where they can create a personal extension of their choice to coincide with the toll-free number for the service.
“General Magic’s voice-enabled services are the best fit with our direction to make our Excite portal easy to use and convenient,” said George Bell, Excite@Home president.
“Voice enabling Internet services is a major element of our business strategy, and one of the reasons we have been investing in the growth of our Network Operations Center infrastructure this year,” said James McCormick, chief financial officer at General Magic.
Also making news was ART, which introduced smARTspeak 3.2, an enhancement to its current smARTspeak voice recognition engine optimized for the wireless environment.
According to ART, the new version is faster, more accurate, easier to use and can support all wireless voice standards-such as Code Division Multiple Access, Global System for Mobile communications and others.
The company said smARTspeak 3.2 can learn users’ voice patterns, including those using different languages or accents, so they may activate applications, access data, send voice mail via e-mail and dial phone numbers. NeoPoint Inc. incorporates the technology in its NeoPoint smart phone product, a CDMA wireless handset.
