The human voice on the Net just got a little louder.
On Monday, search engine Excite@Home and start-up Lipstream launched Excite Voice Chat, a service that brings the human voice to Excite's chat service.
The company also added voicemail capability to its free email services.
"Talking live to someone on the Net -- right now there's no easy way to do that," said Brett Savage, CEO and founder of Lipstream, which is providing the back-end technology to support the service.
Consumers will run the software off a basic Web page, via an ActiveX-based browser plug-in. Instead of typing questions and answers to colleagues, they need only speak into the microphone that is now built into many PCs.
"The only cost to users is [their] actual [Internet service provider] connection," said Craig Donato, Excite's senior vice president of search, communities, and network programming. The service is supported by targeted ad banners.
To participate in spoken discussions, users visit Excite's new voice chat area and choose a chat room. The plug-in application installs and loads, and a list of people appears. To join the conversation, users simply hold down their control keys while speaking.
"If you look at state of net communications, there have been attempts at making telephones out of computers," Savage said. "It hasn't really taken off. It requires large downloads of large software products, and you have to be able to get the IP address of the other person.
"The computer doesn't make much sense of 'telephone' in the proper sense of word," he said. But with this new service, voice communication on the PC is as simple as visiting a Web page.
Participants in the pre-launch beta version of the Excite Voice Chat rooms -- whose subjects range from age-specific groups, to movies, to cooking, to "Pillow Talk," an adult area -- like what they've found.
Users said that while other services and software have live voice capability, this is the first one tied to a general-interest consumer service such as Excite. Plus, they said, it's far simpler to use.
