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Technology Stocks : General Magic -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC who wrote (3789)	9/26/1998 11:30:00 AM
From: Austin S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10081

Repost of PC World article: Get Your Own Virtual Assistant Portico lets you check your e-mail, voice mail, and schedule from the road and make changes using any telephone. by Mike Hogan, special to PC World September 23, 1998, 4:55 p.m. PT How do you keep up with your meeting schedule, e-mail, and voice mail on the road? Do you keep them on a portable or handheld and periodically log into your e-mail account over the Internet and your voice mailbox by phone? Not a bad solution, if you remember to make all the necessary data transfers before you run to that plane. Also, you'll need access to a phone jack at crucial stops along the way to log on for unanticipated schedule changes and to check addresses, phone numbers, or whatever. General Magic has a faster and easier way. For as little as 20 bucks a month, you can check your e-mail, voice mail, schedule, and address book and make changes by any kind of telephone--a lot easier to find than a telephone jack. General Magic calls its new Portico service the "virtual assistant." Basically, you dial a toll-free number and then your password, and you can then give instructions in a normal speaking voice to a pleasant-sounding assistant. You can have "her" read your e-mail or play back your voice mail and forward voice mail to another phone or fax. E-mail replies are accomplished with voice attachments. The assistant also can check and change your schedule and to-do list, find addresses and phone numbers, and even dial your contacts. Portico comes with a set of rules and filters so you can prioritize your e-mail and voice mail by domain name, keyword, or sender. You can filter out the chaff and hear messages only from an established list of senders. Portico will even page you when certain e-mail or voice mail comes in. It works as well from cellular phones as it does from landlines, thanks to the quality of General Magic's magicTalk natural-language user interface, which includes both voice recognition and text-to-speech synthesis. "Most speech recognition companies try to solve a general problem, and it is very difficult to get software to recognize any word on any subject," explains General Magic chair and chief executive Steve Markman. "But we've tuned our system to recognize the common phrases you'll find associated with messaging, PIMs, news, and stocks. It's a more limited application." However, he adds, users are not constrained by the phrases they can use within that context. Portico is speaker-independent, doesn't require any training, and conducts recognition at a normal speaking pace. Alternatively, you also can perform most of the Portico functions using your Web browser at the General Magic site. Portico maintains your personal contact database and schedule on a General Magic server that will synchronize with popular desktop PIMs such as Act, Microsoft Outlook, and Lotus Organizer through a free utility that can be downloaded from the General Magic Web site. You also can set stock alerts, download quotes for your personal portfolio, and get news feeds from PRNewswire, Businesswire, and Associated Press that can be read to you or sent to a fax machine by voice command. Portico pricing comes in five schedules that start with a flat fee of $19.95 a month for 60 minutes of use and top out at $149.95 a month for 1300 minutes. There also is a $50 sign-up fee and 10-percent discount available for annual subscribers.