Hoping to cash in on the expected integration of wireless voice and data applications, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based General Magic Inc. has been striving to complete a service that will do just that.
Nearly a year ago, the company, founded in 1990, dramatically switched gears by completely replacing its upper management team and reducing its work force by a factor of two. At the heart of this shakeup was Steve Markman, the new chairman, president and chief executive officer of General Magic.
He said the company was focused previously on technology licensing, a need which disappeared-along with millions of General Magic’s money-when the Internet came along and became the de facto technology platform.
As new CEO, Markman decided the time had come to change the company’s focus to acquiring revenue through products and services rather than licensing and created a new upper management team focused on product building and marketing to achieve that goal.
“The company’s vision hasn’t changed,” Markman said. `It’s just a narrower focus. We’re now a very market- and customer-focused company.”
That focus has been placed directly on a service code-named Serengeti, expected to launch in mid-1998. What is left of General Magic’s funds has been thrown into this service. The company’s survival rests on its shoulders.
Serengeti is a wireless data “virtual assistant” service based on text-to-speech technology. The idea is to allow mobile workers to retrieve voice mail, e-mail and other information from their computers at work using a wireless or landline phone through a speech-recognition service.
Requests for data are given via spoken commands understood by the speech-recognition technology. The responses to commands, though stored as text data, are delivered in a computer-generated voice using a text-to-speech application.
Markman conducted a live demonstration of the service at Wireless APPS ’97 in Seattle, which drew applause from the tech-savvy crowd, a response he said he has gotten accustomed to.
“When people hear the demonstration, and understand, they get extremely excited,” he said. “I’ve been married for 30 years and I’ve been involved with high technology for 30 years.” When he presented Serengeti to his wife, “she said, `I finally understand something that you’re doing.’ “
Much of the support Serengeti has received to date is directed at its integration of voice and data, an evolution many in the wireless data industry hope will become mainstream.
“It’s a very empowering application,” Markman said. “I think it will help lots and lots of people get control over all the information bombarding them.”
While its launch is not expected for at least six months, Serengeti has enjoyed some successes. They include completed trial services, various technology partnerships-such as a licensing agreement for AcuVoice Inc.’s text-to-speech synthesizer and Starfish Software’s Java-based client/server technology-and the completion of its network operations center.
However, General Magic has several additional partnerships to secure before the service is complete. This process of licensing products from other companies marks a shift in strategy for the company, which previously attempted to produce everything in-house.
Another milestone General Magic must meet is that of expanded field trials. Of particular concern in testing is the interaction between human users and the computer service. Markman considers that interaction unique and believes it must be dealt with delicately in order to succeed. “Field trials become a critical part of that,” he said.
The service trials have raised some interesting user preferences.
“We discovered that people in the trials wanted to be nice to the computer. They asked for phrases like `please’ and `thank you’ that were not encoded into the grammar,” Markman said. “We also learned a lot about how to bring customers up on the service.”
Markman, who is more concerned with launching well than he is of launching on time, said General Magic tweaked the service to meet those needs.
“We don’t want to launch this if is isn’t right,” he commented. “It has to be right.”
