Kathie Layton, CEO, General Magic
Q What does your recent news concerning an enhanced magicTalk enterprise platform mean to enterprises?
A General Magic is committed to providing a product to the Global 2000 that is compliant with the most current voice and Web standards and integrates readily with today's contact center technology. The latest version of the magicTalk Enterprise Platform is VoiceXML 2.0 compliant, incorporates powerful CTI (computer-telephony integration) software and out-of-the-box telephony features. As a result of its partnership with InterVoice-Brite, the magicTalk Enterprise Platform solution now delivers a wide range of CTI features to meet the demands of the fast-growing contact center market for next-generation interactive voice response (IVR) solutions that leverage Internet/Web technologies.
The magicTalk Enterprise Platform suite of software significantly increases the ability of enterprises to rapidly develop and deploy voice self-service applications. Leveraging the existing web infrastructure and General Magic's patented personality-based Voice User Interface (VUI), voice self-service solutions can now enable users to access enterprise information via interactive, personalized voice dialog. In previous versions of the Enterprise Platform, the VUI could be used to augment a transactional Web application, offering users telephone-based access to information that was previously only available over the Web. This new version now delivers standards-based voice application capabilities to the contact center.
Some ask us how we are different from a speech technology vendor. In addition to providing a Web-architected voice platform on which to deploy voice across the enterprise, General Magic delivers advanced VUI capabilities. A VUI enables a user to place a telephone call into the voice application and direct the application to accomplish the caller's objectives. From a technology perspective, a VUI utilizes automated speech recognition (ASR) technology to interpret what the user is saying, but the main focus of General Magic's VUI technology is to create a highly usable and enjoyable voice experience for the caller. Key elements of a VUI include: the logical flow of the application, the presentation of data from the back-end, and speech prompts that either guide the user in what to say or respond to the user's input. Prompts may be either synthesized Text-to-Speech (TTS) or, in General Magic's case, pre-recorded human speech assembled in real-time to replicate a conversational style interaction driven by the user and the backend data. This capability allows companies to replace their touchtone-driven Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems with conversational, interactive voice dialog, humanizing the caller's experience while leveraging the enterprise's existing Web infrastructure.
Q What is the General Magic mission?
A General Magic's ultimate mission is to bring voice to the enterprise by providing software that gives companies a strategic tool for implementing voice self-service. Voice self-service applications will help drive the next quantum leap in financial performance by making enterprise information readily accessible to customers, employees, partners and suppliers. As a result of deploying a corporate-wide strategy to voice-enable its information-driven business processes, the enterprise will be able to achieve a compelling return on investment by driving cost savings, top-line revenue and increased workforce productivity.
Q Why did you choose to align your solutions based upon J2EE™?
A According to industry analysts, J2EE is being embraced by as many as 70% of large enterprises. General Magic brings J2EE, XML and VoiceXML technologies together to create a voice-specific application architecture that leverages existing Web-based infrastructure and enterprise applications. The magicTalk Enterprise Platform is a suite of reusable software component libraries, application frameworks, design patterns, development tools and best practices that turn a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server into a powerful foundation for delivering interactive voice services. Inbound and outbound personalized conversational interactions can now extend the reach of enterprise information and services over both wireless and wireline phones. With the magicTalk Enterprise Platform, General Magic is placing its patented voice user interface technology into the hands of the sizeable global community of Java and Web programmers.
Q Describe a successful speech technology implementation and why you thought it was successful. Please include any benchmark statistics that support your thoughts.
A One of the first licensees of the magicTalk Enterprise Platform is a combined electric and gas utility company in the Southwestern U.S. The utility's voice-based customer service application will enable customers to check account information, get company information, and inquire about payment locations in either English or Spanish. This utility is now deploying this initial voice application designed with the magicTalk Enterprise Platform. The company selected the magicTalk Enterprise Platform to upgrade its customer service by replacing its IVR system with a personality-driven, conversational style VUI that is integrated to its Web application server. Using General Magic's personality-rich voice infrastructure software, the utility will extend its customer service by providing 24x7 access to self-service applications while increasing the productivity of the utility's customer service personnel. Additional savings are expected from the planned expansion of the system.
Another application that is currently being deployed by a Fortune 10 company is a collaborative knowledge management system that delivers telephone access to information stored in a corporate-wide, communities-of-interest, Web application. This solution is expected to deliver significant increases in productivity by its global workforce.
Q What do you believe will be key market drivers for this technology in the short-term? Long-term?
A Fueling the growth of voice self-service in the enterprise is the realization that, even with the Internet and Web-based services, the telephone is still the primary means that customers, employees and suppliers use to contact a company. Deploying self-service applications over the Web has been a boon to many businesses, but many have also realized the need to reach a significantly larger population of their customers - the traditional phone user. While the number of Internet subscribers is continuing to rise, projected increases in the number of mobile phone users will only add to the call volumes that corporate contact centers can expect in the future. For example, Gartner Group estimates a 30 percent increase in calls to contact centers by 2003, thus driving the need for automated VUI-driven speech recognition systems to ensure that contact centers can handle the call volume cost-effectively.
Q What vertical market segments do you see supplying the most growth for speech technology developers and why?
A Vertical markets where customer-service is critical -- such as financial services, insurance, utilities, retail, heath care, and travel -- are the obvious targets for voice services. However, there is great potential for growth within the broader enterprise market, where employees, customers and partners will be keen to have access to critical Web-based information via the telephone, 24 hours a day.
Q What should the speech technology industry as a whole be doing to increase the growth rate of speech technology deployments?
A I believe there are two key impediments to market growth. First, voice applications today are delivered as one-off point solutions. As a result, today's voice applications are inconsistent in the quality of their performance, limited in their scalability and not considered extensible or maintainable by the enterprise. To meet these enterprise needs, it is critical that voice solutions be standards-based and web-architected to deliver consistent performance of voice applications that leverage existing business logic as well as both Web and telephony infrastructure.
Second, today's systems need to humanize the experience of dealing with technology. To that end, General Magic has done groundbreaking work in voice user interface technology and design, and holds a patent for Voice User Interface with Personality. General Magic's pioneering work in the area of crafting human qualities into a voice user interface "personality" is essential to the acceptance of voice self-service applications.
I believe that delivering a Web-architected platform for the deployment of a wide variety of humanized voice apps will drive mass deployment of voice solutions.
Q Who are some of your partners in providing speech technology and why did you choose those companies?
A InterVoice-Brite is a key technology partner and a market leader in speech-enabled IVR solutions. They are using the magicTalk Enterprise Platform as the foundation for their J2EE/VoiceXML next generation IVR solution. In turn, General Magic has integrated InterVoice-Brite's VoiceXML Media Gateway into the magicTalk Enterprise Platform to provide enhanced telephony/CTI connectivity features to the broad market for self-service applications in the call center.
Another key partner is VoiceGenie, a leading provider of VoiceXML Gateway solutions serving millions of end-users at enterprises and institutions worldwide. Upon final integration of the products, VoiceGenie can provide its customers with General Magic's magicTalk® Enterprise Platform for rapid VoiceXML application development in J2EE™ environments.
General Magic also partners with market leaders Nuance, SpeechWorks, IBM, BEA and iLog to supply products, technologies and services upon which General Magic Voice Infrastructure Software products run. This ensures ease of integration by companies using General Magic solutions.
Q How important is the persona in creating a compelling solution? Provide specific proof of your position.
A It is critically important -- and it is a special area of expertise for General Magic. General Magic's work on personality began in 1995, and today the company holds a patent on incorporating personality into the design and implementation of human-like voice applications (U.S. patent "Voice User Interface with Personality" #6,144,938 and #6,334,103 B1). According to the approved patent submission, "The term 'personality' as used in the context of a voice user interface can be defined as the totality of spoken language characteristics that simulate the collective character, behavioral, temperamental, emotional and mental traits of human beings in a way that would be recognized by psychologists and social scientists as consistent and relevant to a particular personality type." Incorporating human personality in a VUI provides a competitive advantage since it has a direct impact on the user's impression of the quality and credibility of the information and can increase purchasing intention. Users automatically, and often unconsciously, respond to and make judgments about the system based on subtle social cues. General Magic's software incorporates its patented methodology, reflecting our expertise in personality-based, interactive voice dialog.
Q Provide us with your thoughts on the various standards that are being implemented and discussed. What are you doing with SALT?
A General Magic brings J2EE, XML and VoiceXML technologies together to create a voice-specific application architecture that leverages existing Web-based infrastructure and enterprise applications.
SALT, which is being driven by Microsoft, and is not a fully developed or formally adopted industry standard, generally addresses the broader requirements of multimodal user interaction. Multimodal interfaces will be an important component of the multi-channel future. Both VoiceXML (specifically focused on voice interaction) and xHTML (focused on text/graphical interaction) standards groups are currently entertaining extension proposals to address the incorporation of multimodal user interaction requirements. General Magic's magicTalk platform is standard's based and will incorporate SALT if and when it becomes generally accepted by Global 2000 companies.