Yes, Intouch's Inflection is an interesting parallel to Portico. It doesn't seem as far along the development path as General Magic's Portico though. Reading through their web site, it's unclear they have any actual customers yet, just mentions of trials. It would seem trials take longer than many investors are willing to wait.
Intouch also has a slightly different plan in that they want to sell systems to be integrated by the customer's system rather than maintaining GM's NOC approach, hence the need of a flexible platform base of both NT and Unix. GM's current NOC approach would seem to make a single platform wiser. Future portability to UNIX may be in the cards, but it wouldn't seem applicable now.
Intouch's plan calls for selling whatever features the customer wants and then selling upgrades an additional features when possible. Customers will develop proprietary systems, again an approach GM has not wanted to take. It seems like GM's approach will be much more profitable if accepted.
Yes, it's an interesting comparison and one well worth watching.
The following is another press release from the company. They have only 3 press releases for the last 2 years. This is from January 1, 1998. Not much to go on.
Here's a link to Inflection's capabilities. intouchsys.com
Regards,
MMark
InTouch Telecom Assistant
InFlection Software for Service Providers
InFlection from InTouch Systems, Inc. (Cambridge, MA) is an open-architecture, voice-enabled software suite that provides telecommunications assistant capabilities to service providers and systems vendors. It is built on a modular software base that allows these clients to offer a variety of telecom services with a common voice user interface. These include voice activated dialing, integrated message management for voice mail, e-mail, and fax, single number service and personal information retrieval and management using the Web.
"Speech recognition applications are a new way that telecommunications service providers can offer highly differentiated services to grow revenues and reduce subscriber churn," said InTouch president Mike Krasner, formerly of BBN Hark. The company, co-founded by Krasner in early 1996, features a number of engineers from that erstwhile endeavor. The company has been keeping a low profile until the announcement of InFlection.
The InFlection architecture is open, allowing use of any speaker independent, continuous speech recognizer. This way InTouch is not tied to a specific technology, and "its customers may select the right recognizer for the application to be offered," Tom Boutureira Director of Marketing told ASRNews. "We are very excited about ALTech and Nuance capabilities." And while ALTech technology is used in the InFlection demo, Boutureira said the company has one customer who is requesting Philips speech recognition. "It's an international company with a specific language requirement, and Philips can provide the language set."
InTouch is positioning itself between the recognizer and the applications providers. "The InTouch business model is to offer voice user interface software embedded on other people's platforms," he continued. The company has had interest from both service providers and platform vendors, who are looking to integrate InFlection, with the exception of AT&T and MCI.
Boutureira said that some service provider customers are trialing InFlection using a prototype platform developed by InTouch for demos and trials. This platform will not be a commercial product. Trials are usually two-phased, with the providers taking all features, trying them all, then using focus groups to pare the feature set down. In phase two, the smaller feature set is trialed and economics of the offering evaluated. While these trials are underway, vocabularies and dialogs may be developed so final implementation on the service provider's platform is accelerated.
On of InFlection's strengths, said Boutureira, is its modular nature, which allows the service provider to provide some or all of the features, depending on their market requirements. For example, with InFlection deployed on a platform, each end-user can be provided with voice activated dialing and voice-controlled voice mail. When a service provider wants to upgrade to additional functionality, additional modules are enabled. Enabled feature sets depend on the customer and who they are servicing, whether it is a new provider in a market wanting to make a splash, or an established vendor wanting to reduce churn. There isn't a defined customer model, nor a vanilla product, said Boutureira. "Most will start out with voice dialing and voice message management, then pick up Follow Me service and real-time information." However, InTouch is talking with one potential customer who wants additional Web-related features as a condition of further business, while another considers the Web features a phase 3 requirement.
One of InFlection's features is the ability to access real-time information from the World Wide Web, including general sports, business, weather, and other news, using voice control. This feature uses an InTouch-developed browser. At this point, the voice-marks, or where an end-user can go using this feature, are preset, (news, weather, stock quotes) said Boutureira, but this limitation will disappear in future versions.
Many of the telecom services, as well as the ability to add applications is like Wildfire's Electronic Assistant offering, but there are two principal differences. InTouch is committed to an open architecture that can work with a variety of speech engines. Wildfire uses its own proprietary speech recognition engine. InTouch also allows the service providers to use their own branding while deploying InFlection features. "Unlike Wildfire, we interface directly into the service provider's prompt systems, so if you want it to sound like BellSouth, you can do it; you're not tied to a persona," said Boutureira. InFlection currently runs on Pentium-based PCs with Dialogic T1 interface cards and Dialogic Antares DSP resource cards. Part of the speech recognition is run on the Antares cards and part on the host computer.
Contact: Tom Boutureira, InTouch Systems, Inc., (617) 497-9800.
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