Voice carries

A few weeks back at the swanky Vortex conference in the California enclave of Laguna Niguel, Sprint CEO Bill Esrey compared his voice to that of a goat. When I heard this, my initial reaction was curiosity about the circumstances that must have led him to make this comparison. That was immediately followed by relief that my own job doesn't involve conversations with goats. Then I realized Esrey was simply making a point about how voice recognition systems deal with different tonal qualities.

That was just one of several references to voice that came up during the conference, many of which came from Goat Voice himself. He predicted that voice will be "the Internet appliance of the future," that voice access to e-mail will become all the rage and that voice portals will extend Internet access to the billions worldwide who suffer through life without PCs. He even made a statement that made him sound like either a politician on the stump or a guy about to enter outer space: "Voice is about to be freed once again by new technologies that allow it to penetrate new realms."

I began to think that either Esrey or I had to be crazy. After all, this whole industry has been consumed by data fever, not to mention streaming sickness, multimedia madness and interactive itch. Nobody ever talks about voice anymore, except to say it's still the only application that makes anyone any money. Could it be that Esrey hasn't been paying attention? Or maybe the job of trying to convince people that just because a magazine has a voice-oriented name doesn't mean it's a voice-oriented magazine has finally taken its toll on me, and now I'm doomed to interpret everything I hear in terms of voice.

I was getting ready to track down Esrey so we could commiserate about our mutual voice-centric existence when I heard another Vortex presenter make this comment: "The use of voice as a command architecture for the wireless Internet is going to be very compelling." This nugget came from Brad Silverberg, CEO of a holding company called Ignition, which funds and incubates wireless Internet start-ups. Before Silverberg started Ignition, he was responsible for things like heading up Microsoft's Windows business, so I figured he probably has a pretty good handle on the direction of consumer trends. And he doesn't talk like a goat, so he also has that going for him.

All of this voice talk had piqued my innate and insatiable journalistic curiosity, so after a few drinks, a walk on the beach, a nice meal and a nap, I decided to investigate. I didn't really find anything out right away, but a week or so later I discovered that Silverberg's Ignition had decided to back a start-up company called etrieve, which lets users control and manipulate e-mail using wireless voice commands. The idea is that even though the majority of the population is already maniacal about e-mail, the road warriors among us still aren't satisfied. Apparently, their time is so precious that their every utterance is measured for its productivity.

After more careful scrutiny, I also discovered hard evidence supporting the existence of voice portals that let people access all kinds of useful stuff from the Web using nothing but their voice and an 800 number. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of them, and they have really catchy names like BeVocal, Talk2.com, @Motion, Audiopoint, Info by Voice, TellMe, 888TelSurf, and my personal favorite, Quack.com. This last one is most likely targeted toward the duck-voiced portion of the population. I made a mental note to pitch Esrey on launching a voice portal aimed at his fellow goat-talkers.

I'm now moderately convinced I have identified voice as the elusive "killer app." In the spirit of Vortex executive producer Bob Metcalfe and that other guy who made up that rule about the doubling of silicon performance, I'm even thinking about declaring some kind of theorem about it. It would probably be something like this: "Voice is always going to be really important, even if you sound like a goat."