Voice-activated technologies like Siri were all the rage in the first dot-com boom
‘Hey Anita’ was the ‘Hey Alexa’ of the 1990s
Voice-controlled assistants are big right now. Apple, Samsung, Microsoft Google, and Amazon all have their respective offerings. Voice is seen as a new computing frontier, the next big thing everyone wants in on, but today’s offerings are not as new as they seem.
Nearly two decades ago, in 1998, Visa, Motorola, and others joined forces with Nuance Communications to create a standard for voice recognition, claiming that “telephone access will break down the last barrier remaining between the mass of consumers and the Internet.” The argument was that access to the web was limited to PCs, and voice technology would negate that prerequisite.
As the dot-com bubble grew, a new breed of startup was conceived. A 2000 article in the New York Times, headlined “Surfing the Web With the Sound of Your Voice,” explained, “Voice portals fill users’ spoken requests for information, traffic reports, stock quotations, sports scores, airline schedules and more…” It pondered, “Will voice edge out keyboards and keypads?” Were the publishing date unknown, you could be forgiven for mistaking it as a reference to Alexa and Siri.
If you thought accessing information from the web was only a thing in a post-iPhone world, you’d be wrong. A dumb phone like the Nokia 3210, with no internet connectivity, could get you access to the same information Siri or Alexa can in 2017. In fact, it would even work on a landline phone with a rotary dial. Between the years 1998 and 2001 there was actually a boom in voice portal startups; mobile phones were spreading, and so was the web. Voice portals were a marriage of the two, so it had to be a hit, or so investors thought. Ironically, voice portals were being touted as a way to get information from the web without a web-connected Palm Pilot-like device. Fast forward to 2017 and devices 100 times more powerful than a Palm Pilot, with 5G high-speed internet are being spoken to, to get information. They are faster and can manage more complex voice commands, but the ends are very similar.
TellMe was the first voice portal. It raised $238 million from Kleiner Perkins. Today, the two people behind it are now hugely successful in the phone-app space. Mike McCue, who was CEO, started Flipboard, and Emil Michael helped build Uber to where it is today. So, it’s no surprise that TellMe let you both get the latest news—like Flipboard—and connected you to your nearest taxi dispatch, by saying “taxi” along with your city and state—like Uber. McCue and Emil both saw the mobile future early and have now followed through on parts of that vision. If you were wondering about the user experience of 1990s voice recognition , David Pogue called TellMe’s tech “almost goof proof.”
Other voice portals followed TellMe: AudioPoint, Quack, TelSurf Networks, Hey Anita, and BeVocal (the last two raised $30 million and $45 million, respectively). Hey Anita’s features were impressively complex. Not only could a user find live flight information, the latest news on various topics, lottery numbers in all 50 states, custom stock prices, and even TV show times, you could also have your Yahoo emails read to you and reply to them with a voice message that was then attached as a .wav file. In addition, you could get turn-by-turn directions read aloud as you drove. Even Shazam, everyone’s favorite song-recognition app, which launched in 1998, first existed as an easy-to-remember phone number—2580, the only four digits in a straight line on a keypad).
This short-yet-significant boom in audible computing actually survived the dot-com crash of the late 1990s and early 2000s. As TellMe and other voice portal services persisted, David Pogue called them the “final freebie” of the era, likening them to a “trailing fireworks spark that refuses to go out.” TellMe pivoted to a B2B offering and was eventually bought by Microsoft for a sizable price.
The vision painted by Nuance Communications and others two decades ago came true for awhile, but then it fizzled out. Since then, we’ve had desktop operating systems ported to phones, physical keyboards have gone away in many cases, while GPS, cameras, and gyroscopes have been added. We’ve had iPhones 1 through 7. And we’ve cycled through 3G, 4G, and now 5G. Yet, after all this, voice is again predicted as the next leap forward. That vision of the future has been resurrected, in part by Siri, bought by Apple from Nuance in 2012. The question is, will Alexa be more of a catch than Anita?
