All links in this article are numbered and appear at the end. This
direction is exciting. It brings web access to a new level.
kelly
the Wall Street Journal
June 30, 2000
Page One Feature
The Hot New Thing Is the Old Phone
In Gimmick-Hungry Dot-Com World
By NICOLE HARRIS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In a tiny makeshift studio, Christopher "Blade" Kotelly is coaching a
professional voice named Tom Glynn. "OK, you're sitting in a '50s
diner. It's upbeat, but people want their cheeseburgers in a hurry,"
says Mr. Kotelly, a 28-year-old staffer at Boston-based SpeechWorks
International Inc. (www.speechworks.com1) "You want your voice to be
quick, to-the-point, but you don't want to be patronizing."
Mr. Glynn takes his cue and begins in his smooth delivery, "Welcome to
MapQuest by phone." Mr. Kotelly sweeps the air with his hands as
though conducting an orchestra. "Good," he says when Mr. Glynn
finishes. "But I want you to change the tone of your voice on the word
'quest.' Be cool and casual." Mr. Glynn takes a swig of water, clears
his throat and launches into another take.
[Go] 2SpeechWorks Plans Two New Products For Speech-Driven Web, Phone
Services (June 29)
[Go] 3Flooz.com to Use Technology From Voice Firm NetByTel (June 28)
[Go] 4IBM Forms Deals With Three Companies To Develop Voice E-Commerce
Platform (June 23)
[Go] 5WorldCom, PhoneRun Announce Voice-Internet Marketing Deal (June
20)
At the cutting edge of the Internet, this is the race of the moment --
building a service that untethers the Web from the PC and brings a
vast new market online to shop, trade stocks, find a recipe or, in the
case of MapQuest.com Inc.'s plan, locate and get directions to
anywhere in the U.S. All that people will need is a telephone and a
voice.
With many of the nation's 90 million cell-phone customers, along with
rising numbers of Palm Pilot devotees, using wireless Web technology,
dot-coms have been rushing to make their content wireless-friendly.
Some, including MapQuest, have teamed up with wireless carriers to put
their content on cell-phone screens. Many more, thinking that only
techies will want to bang out e-mail on cramped cell-phone pads, are
also betting on voice-recognition technology that can be used on
phones of all kinds -- putting them within arm's reach of nearly every
consumer in the nation, computer-savvy or not.
"As a dot-com, our reach was limited to those who got to the Internet
through some type of techie device," says Kathy Kinney, MapQuest's
director of business development, who has been overseeing the New
York-based company's drive to provide its Web content by phone. "We
looked at the phone service and said, 'Holy cow, this is the way we
can reach the neighbor across the street through the phone in her
kitchen that she's been using all her life.' "
Already, America Online Inc. has had a hit with its MovieFone service,
and E*Trade Group Inc. has offered stock-trading by voice for more
than two years. More recently, so-called voice portals like Quack.com
(www.quack.com6) have been providing speech-recognition packages to
the likes of Lycos Inc. and Bid.com International Inc., a
business-to-business auction site for everything from heavy machinery
to airplane parts. AT&T Corp. recently invested $60 million in TellMe
Networks Inc. (www.tellme.com7), Mountain View, Calif., whose 1-800
service provides stock quotes, traffic updates and news headlines, and
may soon offer theater tickets and restaurant reservations.
But transforming the Internet into a little voice in everyone's ear is
a hard, slow slog. Witness the recording session at SpeechWorks'
offices in Boston: Ultimately, the MapQuest system will require the
recording of roughly 4,500 speech prompts, all tapping the
old-fashioned talents of people like Mr. Glynn. Voice-recognition
software is far from perfect, too, and computer generated voices often
sound like just that-computer generated.
Even with the glitches fixed, giving voice to the Web will require
intensive re-engineering, including rewriting software code to
translate text into speech. Service providers must either create
applications in a new technological standard or pay for recorded
content. Making one Web site wireless can run into hundreds of
millions of dollars.
It still has some of the kinks to work out, but MapQuest.com, which
recently agreed to be acquired by America Online, will begin testing
its toll-free "1-800 MapQuest" service in Denver in early July, and
then roll it out nationally at the end of summer.
Making the service free, MapQuest has decided to use audio ads to
generate revenue. While the computer is translating a request and
retrieving the directions to play back, the caller will hear a paid
ad. In addition, callers may hear traffic updates that are "brought to
you by" a particular sponsor.
Kathy Kinney illustration
Ms. Kinney says participants in early focus groups said they didn't
want to be bothered by ads. But, she adds, after they were told the
ads kept the service toll-free, they decided a brief commercial
wouldn't be too "intrusive."
The company seems like a natural for the wireless Web. Already, people
sitting at their computers download about 10 million maps from the
site daily, and many of them print out their maps to carry with them.
MapQuest also licenses its technology to more than 1,500 businesses,
mostly other Web sites. According to Media Metrix, MapQuest received
nearly six million separate visitors in May.
Ms. Kinney says MapQuest's services would be "logical" for mobile
users who don't want to be tethered to a PC or who have no experience
with them. She recalls one trial user of MapQuest's voice-recognition
service saying that she would love to use the service to get
directions instead of waiting for her husband to "fiddle with the
wrong maps."
The 42-year-old Ms. Kinney, trained as a cartographer, began
orchestrating MapQuest's wireless Web strategy last year. Early on,
she and her staff decided they couldn't go it alone and turned to
SpeechWorks, founded by members of a Massachusetts Institute of
Technology speech-technology group.
Early focus-group tests offered some clues to the hurdles the partners
faced: Most people would use the service on their cell phone while
driving. Some people preferred to hear male voices, while others
preferred female. One person wanted the service to disclose
"historical sites, the cleanest rest areas and information about where
the police hang out."
MapQuest, too, had to adjust some of its ambitions to fit the
technological reality. For example, some engineers wanted the service
to let users listen to choices of cities and states when seeking
directions, the way the Web site now offers lists of locales.
SpeechWorks balked. As Roy Feldhusen, a SpeechWorks engineer, told the
MapQuest team at the time: "God help you if you were looking for Zion,
Kentucky." MapQuest deferred to SpeechWorks. Users will be asked to
specify a city or state.
Designed mostly for dictation, early forms of voice-recognition
technology required users to speak very slowly, each word pronounced
distinctly. The systems were difficult to use, limited in vocabulary
and often didn't recognize words correctly. But speech-recognition
software providers like SpeechWorks and Nuance Communications Inc.,
Menlo Park, Calif., rely on the latest generation of the software,
which thanks to increased processing power has much greater accuracy.
This has allowed the companies to create large databases for, say,
multiple pronunciations of the same word, so that a computer can
recognize a Southern drawl as well as a Brooklyn honk.
The MapQuest phone service is a combination of speech-recognition
software and "text to speech" technology. A speech-recognition
"engine" will translate callers' voices into digitized computer
commands for mining the MapQuest database for directions. Then, to
give the directions back to the caller, the system will use software
that, in essence, translates the MapQuest Web content into audible
speech -- either pre-recorded or computer-generated.
Ms. Kinney says she originally wanted callers seeking driving
directions to be able to say where they were calling from and where
they wanted to go all in one breath. "The optimum for us would have
been all-natural language ... having the callers being able to say
exactly what they want at the outset, instead of being drilled down,"
Ms. Kinney says.
But that wasn't feasible. Requests for directions must be broken down
into a sequence of ever-narrower prompts for parameters, from city and
state, to street name and address, in order to sort through the
database.
Even then, from the experience of operating their Web site, MapQuest
executives knew the speech system would have to be able to recognize
even the most unusual caller response. Online users often typed in
"BWI" for Baltimore-Washington Airport, for example, leaving it to the
MapQuest computer to equate the two.
Ms. Kinney wanted the phone service to allow for such discrepancies.
"We also knew there would be multiple pronunciations of words, given
people's accents," she says. Working with SpeechWorks programmers,
MapQuest was able to create a database of hundreds of street names,
cities, airports and other locations for the phone service, in various
permutations.
During the first round of testing (a focus group that included
SpeechWorks and MapQuest employees), users discovered that New York's
entire borough of Brooklyn was left out of the database. Then, after
Brooklyn was added, the software didn't recognize it accurately. When
a user spoke the words "Brooklyn, New York" after the computer asked
for the city and state, the automated voice shot back: "I think you
said Portland, New York. Is that correct?"
In another test, when a user, responding to the prompt asking for an
airport name, said "Dulles," the system couldn't respond because the
database allowed only for the full phrase "Washington Dulles Airport."
SpeechWorks fixes these glitches as they arise, and will continue to
do so as users point them out.
The "text-to-speech" part of the project proved more problematic.
SpeechWorks is recording as much of the MapQuest content as it can
using voice talent like Mr. Glynn for basic prompts such as "Where are
you traveling from?" and "What's the name of the city and state?" But
for much of the service, MapQuest had few options but to go with a
technology still in its infancy. "There was no way in the world we
could record every set of driving directions," Ms. Kinney says.
One of the first systems SpeechWorks brought to her wasn't up to
snuff. "I just shook my head," she says. SpeechWorks had better luck
with text-to-speech software from industry pioneer Learnout & Hauspie
Speech Products NV of Belgium.
Still, such software overall "sounds like a drunken robot," says John
Dalton, a consultant with Forrester Group. "It's tolerable for brief
spurts of information, but you wouldn't want to hear a book or
anything using this technology."
SpeechWorks recently signed a deal with AT&T under which AT&T is
licensing its text-to-speech technology to SpeechWorks in exchange for
an undisclosed financial stake in the company. SpeechWorks says it may
use the AT&T software, which sounds more natural and is very close to
a recorded human voice, in the MapQuest package. (SpeechWorks itself
recently registered for an initial public offering.)
Once speech-recognition and text-to-speech software was in place, the
fine-tuning began. Ms. Kinney in particular was worried about coming
up with a way to allow users to retrieve step-by-step directions while
driving. Focus-group tests had told her that callers would most likely
use the service while driving, making it difficult for them to write
down directions. But she didn't want users to have to stay on the line
for long periods of time, running up costly 1-800 fees on MapQuest's
dime.
"Kathy wanted to make sure that people were encouraged and didn't feel
nervous about getting off the line," says Steve Chambers, a
SpeechWorks marketing executive.
So SpeechWorks programmers have developed a "bookmark" system that
allows users to pause the directions at any time. The voice prompt
tells callers: "I'll reserve this place in the application and when
you call back we can pick up from here." Hitting the redial button
picks up where the directions left off after a few short steps.
As the test launch has drawn closer, Ms. Kinney and Mr. Chambers have
been overseeing the finishing touches on the human touch of MapQuest's
new service. At an early meeting, Ms. Kinney and Mr. Chambers sketched
a few raw ideas about the MapQuest voice that will be used to brand
the service.
"Maybe we can make it entertaining for users," Mr. Chambers said.
Ms. Kinney asked for specifics.
"Well, what do you think about the voice saying something like 'What?
You're lost again,' " he said. "Or maybe if they choose Brooklyn, we
can have a voice with a heavy Italian New Yorker accent, like the
Sopranos."
Even now, though, Ms. Kinney isn't sure whether she will use a male or
female voice for the service. "There may be a question if a man will
want to hear directions from a woman's voice," she says.
At a recent focus-group gathering, the male option seems to be winning
out. At least three different participants, male and female, request
the voice of James Earl Jones. "He has the voice of someone I trust,"
says one. "Someone who wouldn't get me lost."
Write to Nicole Harris at [log in to unmask]
_________________________________________________________________
URL for this Article:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB96231664877464950
5.djm
Hyperlinks in this Article:
(1) http://www.speechworks.com
(2)
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB96223832629236166
7.djm
(3)
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB96214301754245574
6.djm
(4)
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB96172311845639017
6.djm
(5)
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB96145195951258990
6.djm
(6) http://www.quack.com
(7) http://www.tellme.com/
(8) mailto:[log in to unmask]
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