A few years ago, General Magic fell on hard times when Magic Cap, the operating system it had developed for handheld computers, failed to win customers over. The company attributed Magic Cap's tepid reception to businesspeople's perception of PDAs as unnecessary and burdensome devices. And, around the same time, the Net grew up, changing market conceptions of mobile computing.
Today, things are turning around for General Magic. The Sunnyvale, California, company is rolling out Serengeti, a next-generation electronic assistant based in part on Magic Cap's agent technology. What makes Serengeti interesting – and will allow it to succeed where Magic Cap failed – is that it pipes vital computer resources, including Internet data, through the most ordinary of information technologies: the telephone.
Roaming workers dial up Serengeti to check email, route calls, change appointments on shared office calendars, and access press releases, stock prices, and traffic conditions. This idea is not new: similar services, such as the Wildfire Assistant, send office data over the phone. But they're constrained by limited offerings, rigid menu structures, and older speech-recognition technologies.
Serengeti, on the other hand, does away with voicemail-like menu choices. Instead, General Magic has developed a so-called Voice User Interface (that's VUI to you), which rewards natural speech, including computer recognition of the same command said any number of ways and the ability to interrupt the system to ask for different information at will.
This is a true pull service – Serengeti offers relevant information through an easy-to-use interface over a common appliance. For anyone who has subscribed to push-media pager services, which set off a conniption in your pocket every time a company announces its earnings, the ability to regulate the flow of digital info and access it over the phone makes a lot of sense.
Release: late 1997. General Magic: +1 (408) 774 4000.
This article originally appeared in the November issue of Wired magazine.
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