Assisted Living

In a market climate in which carriers are fighting to find and hold on to loyal subscribers, they are looking for anything that will give them an edge. Vendors are quick to tout enhanced services as an effective weapon. Although they have yielded limited success so far, there seems to be a resurgence in speech-enabled communications, and both carriers and vendors are betting on their growing acceptance. As an increasingly mobile society spends more time in the car, safety issues, as well as convenience, may prove strong motivators for subscribers to pay for such services.

Many vendors are positioning these products as personal assistants. The term has been around for several years, mostly with Wildfire's product, but a new generation of personal assistants is emerging. Although Wildfire's original service-bureau channel still is open, according to Leslie Anderson, Wildfire director of corporate communications, all of the company's R&D efforts are focused on the new, mass-market version of the product and on growing the carrier channel.

General Magic with its Portico product and Webley with its English butler assistant of the same name have joined Wildfire in the personal-assistant arena, and Lucent also is preparing to enter the fray. It demonstrated a personal assistant product at PCS '98 and plans to announce availability this quarter.

MARKET FORCESDespite going through a product facelift, Wildfire still is ahead of the game. Both PacBell and Bell Mobility offer Wildfire to their customers -- Bell Mobility since Sept. 16 and PacBell since Dec. 7. In PacBell's case, the road to deployment was a long one, spanning 2 1/2 years.

"What slowed down PacBell's deployment was right when they finished their market trial, they were bought out by SBC, and we had to start over," Anderson said. PacBell's market trial took place in Spring 1997, when 500 of its San Diego wireless subscribers used the service for three months.

"We did both qualitative and quantitative analysis of those 500 users, which really helped us understand what the product needed to appeal to a broad set of the population," said Stephen Krom, PacBell vice president of marketing for Los Angeles. The company came out of the trial knowing that it wanted the product to have broad appeal and worked with Wildfire to refine it.

PacBell chose to roll out the personal assistant service first in the Los Angeles market -- the largest of the seven regions in its wireless network -- because it has one of the longest commutes in the country.

"It is a car town," Krom said. "These people are out and about in their cars on average 2+ hours a day and are looking for tools to help them be more productive."

Although the goal is to reach a broad array of people, PacBell is testing the waters with the business segment through its direct sales force. PacBell offers Wildfire for $20 on top of its $49-and-higher rate plans, and customers get the same 300 minutes and 1,000 weekend minutes. Subscribers also can get free domestic long distance via Wildfire through June 1999.

Bell Mobility has been offering Wildfire to its customers since Sept. 16, but its situation is slightly different. Bell Mobility has leased Wildfire for one year from sister company Bell Canada, which bought the hardware and software from Wildfire. A third party handles the billing and back-end maintenance, and Bell Mobility takes care of the marketing and customer service. Bell Mobility is using this lease as a market trial before bringing a personal assistant product in-house. It had never done a full evaluation of Wildfire before Bell Canada offered to lease the service.

"It was a very inexpensive way for us to get into the market, get some market research done and find out what our customers want from this type of service," said Diane Scaini, Bell Mobility product manager, services development, enhanced services. "As a result, we are going back and evaluating all of the vendors that are out there and making sure we make the right choice for our customers."

Bell Mobility also has chosen to focus on high-end business users at the outset and offers the service for $20 (Canadian). Because the service is not in-house, the carrier had to choose between the consumer and business segment for billing purposes, Scaini said. She added that one motivation for choosing the business route was getting a feel for who would buy a $20 product.

"I know what types of people will take a $5 and a $3 service because we have voice mail for $5, and we have voice-dial service at $3," Scaini said. "We know what these people look like, but the $20 service is something a little different."

Neither Bell Mobility nor PacBell has done much marketing or advertising. Bell Mobility has information about Wildfire on its web site, but otherwise has focused on direct mail with some follow-up telemarketing. Scaini said she needs to keep the number of subscribers fairly low because the third party handling the activations and billing couldn't handle a large volume. PacBell is using bill inserts, and it has done some radio, local print and trade magazine advertising.

TRANSITION ISSUESAlthough no wireless carrier offers General Magic's Portico to subscribers, several, including Bell Atlantic Mobile, BellSouth, Cellular One San Francisco and Triton, are running trials within their respective organizations. IP telephony provider Qwest is getting the product into customer hands via a market trial.

Portico is a service-bureau product that currently targets high-end business users. The assistant goes beyond call processing to give its subscribers access to data. It gives subscribers stock information and reads them the news. It also reads e-mail messages and can forward them to a fax machine or record a response that the subscriber can send as an e-mail attachment. Since it began offering the service in July, most of Portico's subscribers have come through the reseller channel. Buck Krawczyk, General Magic corporate communications director, said the company is using its reseller program to gain feedback from its subscribers.

"You can do all the beta tests in the world, but when people are actually paying you to use the service, you really find out the things they like and the things that may not be as useful to them," Krawczyk said.

One of the company's more interesting subscribers is a reverend from Virginia who has two congregations. He uses Portico every day to keep in touch with parishioners and to conduct church business.

"We always talk about mobile professionals being our target audience," Krawczyk said. "Yet here is an example of someone you don't think of as the typical mobile professional, but he is mobile, and it certainly is his profession."

Despite its current base of business users, General Magic plans to work on opening up the carrier channel. Doing so likely will broaden the subscriber makeup.

Krawczyk said that carriers probably will want various configurations of Portico. The company has not made any commitments to any carrier about how the services would be broken down, but he said there are several possibilities for how Magic Talk might be able to provide the front-end voice platform. Magic Talk is the technology platform that enables Portico's speech recognition, voice response, text-to-speech and inherent personality. For example, Intuit recently announced that in the next few months, its Quicken.com users will be able to access much of their financial portfolio information using the Magic Talk technology.

"We're not providing e-mail to them," Krawczyk said. "We're not providing address-book information or any of that. We're providing the front end with the speech and the personality so they can use the phone to access the information that already exists on their Quicken.com accounts."

According to Steve Markman, General Magic president & CEO, the problem with breaking up Portico is that eventually carriers will want to offer all of the services anyway, so then you have to think about smooth transitions. He said that the approach General Magic took in the retail market, for better or worse, was to offer the entire Portico package.

"You don't have to waste your minutes using it for things you don't want," Markman said. "It doesn't cost you any more or less to have those things. If you want to do a lot of voice dialing, that's how you spend your minutes. If you only want to use the voice interface in an emergency, you can use the web where you don't use up any minutes. It's sort of the infinite flexibility."

MODULAR APPROACHAlthough "keep it simple" continues to be a mantra for carriers, they also want to be able to add features to the assistant easily down the road. Lucent is working to offer a product that will do just that. Its personal assistant combines Bell Labs' speech-recognition technology, messaging from the Octel division and call processing from the company's intelligent networking platform. The company is touting this as a much simpler service that carriers can offer for less than $10 a month.

Dan Johnson, Lucent product marketing manager, said Lucent decided the other personal assistants were too complex. He said the broad audience wouldn't be able to understand them, and carriers would find them difficult to sell.

"Their sales channels are selling a lot of services, and if you take a complex service, they have to be able to articulate the benefits to potential subscribers who also don't quite understand it," Johnson said. "Then they look at the $20 subscription fees. People just cannot make the value connection there."

The carriers may want to start simple, but the key to them is to be able to give all of their subscribers what they want, from the simple to the complex.

Krom said in the future he would like to see some of the things Wildfire had in its original product such as follow-me service. He also cited Portico's text-to-speech and e-mail-reading features as something he would like to see soon.

The one feature Scaini said she wished she could offer right now was the capability to receive faxes through the personal assistant. She also has received many requests for a scheduling option, and she would like to see an e-mail reader at some point.

"As a carrier, the ability to upsell is more powerful than anything else I do," Scaini said. When a vendor introduces a new option for the personal assistant, she would like to be able to simply push a button to offer the subscribers that capability. This method eliminates the need for the carrier to run a query identifying which subscribers to either send direct mail to or to telemarket.

"They have a relationship with the personal assistant, (who) can give subscribers helpful hints or say 'hey, we've got a new service,'" he said. "So she's doing the selling for me, and I think that's a lot more powerful."

PERSONALITYThe assistant's personality can have a powerful effect on subscribers, and vendors have taken the personality issue in different directions. General Magic did an extensive amount of research, working with two Stanford social psychologists who have done a lot of work with how people interact with technology. Then the company hired a professional voice talent who has done several national commercials and children's animated cartoons to "be" the assistant. General Magic also is working on adding both male and female personalities, giving subscribers a better chance of finding a personality that matches their own.

"Research has shown that if you match the personality of the user with the assistant, the users feel they have had a better experience, they feel the information is better and that the assistant is more intelligent," Krawczyk said.

Wildfire also made its assistant friendly and helpful, but it didn't want subscribers to grow tired of dealing with her.

"Wildfire is chatty in the beginning," Anderson said. "But the prompts fade away over time, so as you demonstrate proficiency, she speeds it up."

Lucent's idea is that the user interface should be transparent and should disappear in the background. After all, subscribers are on the service to get things done, Johnson said.

"The assistant is going to sound friendly; it's just not going to have any additional commentary or dialogue beyond what is essential for getting done whatever you want to get done." He added that no matter where the subscriber is in the service, he could barge in and issue a new command.

Perhaps the most memorable assistant personality is Webley's English butler, who will set up conference calls, read subscriber e-mail, read faxes as e-mail or forward them anywhere and process calls. The subscriber also can synchronize PalmPilot and Outlook information via the Internet.

Choosing the right personality is a tricky business because no matter how much or how little personality vendors give their assistants, some people will be unhappy. The issue becomes even trickier however, when vendors work internationally. Wildfire's Anderson said that at least 60% of this year's sales activity would be in Europe. So far, she said, Wildfire has been translated into Italian and French, and it has been localized for British English.

Scaini said the personal assistants on the market need to be tailored for the Canadian market.

"We tend not to be quite so snappy," she said. "We are a little more subdued people, and I've had some people comment on Wildfire not being too Canadian, so I would probably think that before we launch anything internally, we would need to review some of the speech to make sure it is Canadianized."

From pricing and features down to personality, vendors are working to offer a useful assistant with staying power. The choices will only become more difficult as more vendors enter the personal-assistant arena.

"This is going to be a hotly-contested area," Markman said. "We all have our different views as to what's going to work and what's not going to work in terms of capturing people's attention and getting them to pay for it, but the companies that supply carriers absolutely believe that voice-based services are going to be a very large market."

Almost everyone agrees on the final destination, but each is taking a different route to get there.