To: Rick Rappaport who wrote (3876 ) 10/12/1998 3:54:00 PM From: Mark Oliver Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 10081
Rick, I found mention of the deal you question between Lucent and Spyglass. Certainly Lucent has it's eyes on markets that cross over General Magic. The key here for me is that GMGC has enough patents to control their own future and they make a good grab for market share using what seems like a good lead in time to market. In this particular case, we are talking about Lucent/Spyglass using a phone to browse a web site. I believe this will eventually be added to Portico via Web-on-Call ( genmagic.com ). It appears that GMGC's offering is a direct dial program, where Spyglass is dynamic allowing you to read any website, but then again looking at what they offer in this press release it is in fact limited. Both systems seem to hold promise, but you have to wonder how great the need is at this time. It looks to me like voice browsing is a vertical market which is also the GMGC approach. Currently, they have customers like the FDA who give users a number to dial into their web site and access information. I tried the demo a while back and found it cumbersome. It seems again that TTS is not pleasing for getting large quantities of information IMHO. Lucent/Spyglass seem to describe a system that can strip away the content of a web site and just present it as text which would then be read by TTS. Doesn't really sound all that complicated. Imagine doing a search on any subject that comes back with 20 hits, not 25462. Then imagine a TTS reading through all the choices and you choosing one. Then trying to navigate the site with no visuals and find what you want. Sounds like trying play chess without a board. I believe these systems have to be more goal oriented (vertical) or include some visuals to make the system user friendly. There have been a lot of announcements for Win CE and Palm Pilot that are building a case for an excellent palm based tool that will go very well with combined voice/visual presentation. I think we shall see Portico become an even greater tool when it is integrated into a computer phone. But we have a product today, Portico, demonstrating function that fulfills a need. General Magic is trying to focus on building a base in function that can address immediate needs and provide the cash flow to go forward. Lucent can afford to have a lot of pie in the sky applications of which many will never see the light of day. GM can not. Does this announcement mean that Lucent is competing with Portico? No. Lucent does have strong technology in all areas where GM plans to compete. Lucent has a scary lawsuit with Periphonic based on how they handle Dialog. Again, you have many components to a system like Portico. ASR to convert voice into computer understandable commands, and TTS to get the data back out of the computer to the user. But Dialog is the key to systems like Portico, hence the need to identify Magic Talk for future uses other than Portico. How the Dialog system understands and interacts with the user is key to system usability. Lucent has patents on Dialog and they've said Periphonic is in violation. GM also has a host of patents in Dialog. Is GM's technology strong enough to defend? That is the real question for me. Maybe I miss something, but I find no serious threat from Lucent/Spyglass announcement at this time. Please let me know why you find it a worry. Regards, Mark Monday October 12 12:59 PM EDT Lucent, Spyglass team up on voice Web browsing SAN FRANCISCO (Wired) - A new prototype, developed jointly between Spyglass and Lucent Technologies, allows telephone-based Web browsing using voice control. The device, on display Monday at a wireless IT conference in Las Vegas, allows users to dial a phone number and then navigate standard Web pages using voice commands, and ''listen'' to voice-synthesized pages. Though the phone browser's content offerings are so far limited to weather, sports scores, and stock quotes, the companies said that a wide range of Web-based services will eventually be accessible. The phone browser is a joint product of Lucent's speech-recognition and text-to-speech technologies, and Spyglass Prism, a Web server system that selectively filters Web pages to extract and package content for computing platforms with limited display and interface capabilities. Spyglass (Nasdaq: SPYG - news) said its system will ignore extraneous text commonly found on Web pages. ''Headlines, related links, advertisements, and the like may add value when a page is viewed on a PC, but it is too much information to deliver via a telephone,'' the company said in a statement. After buying Mosaic -- the Web's first graphical browser -- in 1994, Spyglass licensed it to Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT - news), which then used the code as the basis for Internet Explorer. In recent times, Spyglass has positioned itself as a company that develops Web-browsing software for so-called ''constrained environments,'' including handheld PCs, wireless devices, and set-top boxes. The companies did not say when the technology will be on the market.