Excite@Home gets chatty: Portal will offer real-time chat, unified messaging

Voice and Internet are converging, and Excite@Home nudged them closer last week by launching its free VoiceChat service.

Visitors to voicechat.excite.com will now be able to "chat" over the Internet protocol network using PCs with microphones and speakers. They can join one of the rooms Excite has established around ages or interests and speak with groups of up to ten people. They can also retire to a private area for a one-on-one talk, "tune out" obnoxious chatter and send instant text messages to one person while talking with a group.

VoiceChat is one of two free voice offerings from Excite@Home this week. The second gives users free access to a single Web-based inbox where they can get all their voice mail, e-mail and faxes via PC - hearing the voice mail as a streaming audio file.

"We're going to incorporate voice around the Excite network," said Faith Sedlin, Excite@Home's director of product marketing. "These are the first few steps in a series of many. We believe voice is a true differentiator, and the big take-up rate of these two products is an early validation of that."

The technology underlying VoiceChat was developed by Lipstream Networks, which runs a farm of multipoint audio servers linked to the Qwest Communications backbone. Less than a year old, start-up Lipstream provides a ready-made infrastructure for audio on the Internet, said founder Bret Savage. Someone who wants to use VoiceChat, or any of the e-commerce applications Lipstream hopes to provide, downloads an ActiveX control or plug-in once and starts talking. The control is small, "like installing a big JPEG on your Web site," Savage said. "We purposely got rid of the features that usually come with a voice application. Voice shouldn't be an application - it should be like your telephone, which is simple and boring."

Lipstream chose Qwest to host its server because the carrier guarantees 95 millisecond latency across its network. Getting users onto the Qwest network quickly and keeping them there helps hit its own 250-millisecond latency targets. Lipstream also uses dynamic buffers that can adjust to network conditions and compensate for one bad connection among five people in an Excite VoiceChat room, for example.

To prepare for those times when they're not on-line, unified messaging users can visit www.voicemail.excite.com, where they will get a toll-free number and choose a 10-character extension that friends can dial to send voice mail and faxes from anywhere in the United States. Users can pick up voice messages as streamed audio when they check their e-mail at the ExciteMail Web site; they can read faxes as text. Users can store 60 messages for up to a month.

More than 15,000 users signed up for VoiceChat June 21, the first day of its beta test. The interest came without any promotion beyond a notice on the Excitemail Web page, Sedlin said. The service will remain in beta for several weeks to test its scalability, then will be deployed nationwide.

Unified messaging is becoming a commodity, Sedlin said, just like e-mail. "But for the next six to 12 months, we think this will be an absolute differentiating feature. For one thing, our model of giving out free 800 numbers is pretty hard to copy." The company is promoting only one central toll-free number, 1-888-Excite2, but has batches of 800 numbers to support it.

Excite@Home's VoiceChat comes with instructions, but the application has been designed to download quickly, take up little space and perform only the functions most chatters will want.