Lucent Trials PhoneBrowser with DriveThere.com

As a way for mobile phone users and on-the-go callers who are without PCs to access information from the Web using spoken commands, Lucent Technologies Inc. (Murray Hill, NJ) has developed PhoneBrowser. The Bell Laboratories technology is being developed as a new business by Lucent's New Ventures Group, and the company has planned an initial customer trial with DriveThere.com (St. Louis, MO), a new type of business-to-business and business-to-consumer motor club that provides information and services for motorists via a Web portal.

The technology allows consumers to access the Web with any telephone, providing input to Web sites via natural language speech commands and receiving content via recorded audio or synthesized
text-to-speech technology. For service providers, PhoneBrowser will build, host, and manage Web speech applications, offering these customers a variety of ways to leverage the new access capability.

The technology will enable wireless carriers to offer new premium services to subscribers. Recent marketing studies conducted by Lucent indicate that potential users of speech-enabled wireless services will pay a monthly fee for the right packages of services, including e-mail reading, turn-by-turn directions, traffic alerts, weather reports, stock quotes, telephone directories, concierge-like services for local information and other specialized services.

How It Works
The features will make these services user-friendly. For example, consumers can interrupt spoken content using the barge-in feature to navigate to other pages or Web sites. The system summarizes pages in a concise manner, signifying fonts like bold text, for example, with special voices. The service can access current Web sites without the need for them to be reprogrammed.

Based on a broad portfolio of existing and pending patents, the technology is designed to work with any Web site that uses Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and it is ready for the development of new applications. Enterprises, commercial Web sites, and telecom service providers can extend the reach of existing applications and create a new class of Web applications that employ mobility and lend themselves to a voice interface. Future versions will work with Web sites using the emerging W3C voice markup language.

Customer Trial
DriveThere.com is using the Web to redefine what drivers expect from a motor club. Its goal is to make motoring better for everyone traveling by highway, whether for business or leisure.

Current DriveThere.com features include a service to help motorists renew their vehicle registration, order custom plates, or pay parking tickets electronically. It also features turn-by-turn driving directions, extensive maintenance guides, and destination guides. In the coming months, the site will include new applications such as a complete highway information guide that will provide turn-by-turn directions to roadside services such as hospitals, restaurants, and gas stations from any U.S. Interstate or highway; a trip guide that will provide business travelers with information about business services closest to their destinations; and real-time traffic and alternate routing capabilities. It will also add e-reminders to help motorists make sure motorists never miss a critical maintenance service, and emergency roadside assistance that's accessible from any two-way communication device such as a pager, phone or personal digital assistant (PDA).

The highway information database to be used in the test was developed by Ultradata Systems (St. Louis, MO), a provider of highway travel information and a one-third owner in DriveThere.com.

Edited by Ellen Jensen