One measure of a white-collar worker's status is often a personal secretary or executive assistant. A killer app may replace human helpers with an intelligent agent that would be totally digital. Wildfire Communications has incorporated this idea into a product called Wildfire, a HAL-like presence eavesdropping on every call you make.
What makes Wildfire such an exciting and powerful application, however, is that you don't need a computer to use it. You can link up with Wildfire from any phone, even a cellular or pay phone, or have it call you wherever you are. No matter where you are, you have full access to its capabilities.
You can tell Wildfire to sort
your messages and play them back to you, or you can ask it to play a message from a sender by speaking his or her name. You can respond to a message immediately by simply saying the messenger's name or number. Wildfire will dial it for you, or send a message to the caller's pager. If you're on one call and receive another, Wildfire "whispers" the caller's name in your ear and lets you decide whether or not to interrupt your current call or relay a specific message to the new caller. It will schedule and remind you of follow-up calls, and it will forward calls to different numbers (cellular, hotel, home, etc.) based on your schedule. And Wildfire will let you prioritize contacts so it can screen your calls during hectic times.
During a Wildfire session, you call up the agent by simply saying "Wildfire" and pausing. Suddenly, a female voice announces "Here I am!" -- the signal that Wildfire is waiting for your instructions. "It acts like a person you'd want to work with, as opposed to acting like a mach
ine," says William J. Warner, CEO and founder of Wildfire Communications. "There are a lot of telephony applications that are Touch-Tone-based that act like machines. That's not what people want. They want to be able to talk to their assistant and get stuff done."
The software uses several speech-recognition technologies that add up to a natural, conversational feel for the user. For example, here's a typical Wildfire dialog for setting up a contact:
User:
Wildfire.
Wildfire:
Here I am.
User:
Create a contact.
Wildfire:
What kind?
User:
Person.
Wildfire:
What's the name?
User:
John Mello.
Wildfire:
Once more.
User:
John Mello.
Wildfire:
Which phone number should I add?
User:
Work.
Wildfire:
What
's the number?
User:
555-1212.
Wildfire:
Got it.
Wildfire uses discrete speech recognition to understand responses to its questions, such as what kind of contact and which phone number, because these responses are single words. When the user gives the new contact's name, however, the system uses trained speech because it needs to learn a new pattern. The system uses a speaker-independent continuous recognizer for numbers.
As impressive as Wildfire is, however, some industry insiders think it lacks one crucial component that a true CTI killer app needs: a seamless connection to what's happening inside the computer on the knowledge-worker's desk. Wildfire handles phone functions with elegance, but it doesn't connect to the data that's the lifeblood of an organization's operations, or to applications the worker may have running.
Wildfire runs on a dedicated server, a 90-MHz Pentium box with 128 MB of memory and 16 digital signal proc
essors from Texas Instruments. Prices start at $50,000.
Wildfire: One Wild and Not-So-Crazy Helper
