Could this be magic?

Every once in a great while, a company fools the pundits, financial analysts and other keepers of the collective industry wisdom. It rises from the ashes like the mythical phoenix.

Readers know my aversion to using this space for recommending specific vendors and their products. However, there is an exception to every rule.

General Magic, Sunnyvale, Calif., (www.genmagic.com)-specifically its soon-to-be-released service, code named "Serengeti"-is mine.

Seven years ago, like almost everyone-including original investors AT&T, Sony, Motorola, et al-I bought into General Magic's vision of the coming era of intelligent agency. True to its hyped logo, General Magic would pull a rabbit out of its hat. Its Telescript software, powering the now-defunct AT&T PersonaLink Service, would become the lingua franca of the smart messaging/intelligent networking age. The intuitive interface of its Magic Cap operating system would replace Mac and Windows, first on personal digital assistants and then on desktops. The IPO was the Netscape of its day.

Unfortunately, General Magic ended up more than a hair short of its promise.

The good news is that, surprisingly, the product-really a Release 1.0 benchmark for a new class of workflow-oriented software- solves some real problems, possibly yours.

If you're like the average worker in a recent survey, you manage 178 messages and documents daily. This purportedly includes 61 phone calls/messages (wireline and wireless), 20 voice mails, 24 e-mails, nine pages and 16 faxes. You could be the subject of a New Yorker cartoon.

Serengeti acts as a virtual assistant. It is an Internet-based application with a natural voice user interface that is device-agnostic. Serengeti weds universal messaging with personal information management.

It leverages General Magic's intelligent agent research to produce something useful and potentially valuable. It enables our evolving virtual persona to fulfill our desires instead of interfering. It allows us to do something unusual in our increasingly hectic world: be more responsive to those with whom we communicate and more productive.

The great frustration of the electronic age has been that senders of messages have had their expectation levels raised. Despite years of evidence to the contrary, when we hear, "You know the drill, here comes the tone," we believe that someone will call us back within the hour. They never do. A day would be nice, two tolerable. In our increasingly uncivil society, mere acknowledgment of receipt would be an improvement. E-mail is no better. We are going through a crisis in responsiveness.

Here's where Serengeti comes in: You call me. I'm in a meeting and can't be interrupted. I've instructed my virtual assistant to tell you I'm in a meeting and give you the alternative to leave a message and schedule time on my calendar for a return call. I can even have my assistant page me to say you've called and are now on my callback agenda. You feel good. I feel good. I keep your business.

Other services such as Wildfire have used natural or synthetic voice assistants to route messages, complete calls and provide message status. Serengeti takes this approach a step further by adding intelligent interaction with personal information management capabilities.

General Magic displayed Serengeti at the recent CTIA show. The reason for targeting wireless operators as service agents is simple: They need minutes of use.

Serengeti can increase minutes from calling parties as well as called parties because of the compelling experience of interacting with something that literally makes connections and solves problems. The fact that Serengeti could decrease churn is a side benefit. What it provides is a premium capability in an increasingly thin margin business.

Whether Serengeti enables General Magic to finally extricate that rabbit from the hat is problematic. But employing a friendly voice interface, intelligent agent functionality and the World Wide Web paradigm with no proprietary platforms appears to be the correct value proposition. It may enable smart interaction among the virtual us, the real us and those who wish to communicate with us.

My thanks to those of you who volunteered solutions to naming the final IP in last month's column. Karen Strouse, a telecom consultant in Florida, wins the prize for her suggestion: "instant presence."