Pen-Based Computing

Up for Some Magic!

John Jerney

Back around 1993 and 1994, a small company called General Magic was the talk of both Silicon Valley and the then-emerging world of handheld computing. This once highly secretive company, headed by some of the brightest engineers and marketing talent around, had just introduced a handheld operating system that they hoped would change the world.

Dubbed Magic Cap, the system packed a lot of technology behind a user interface that many thought showed as much originality as the Macintosh nearly ten years earlier. And embedded deep inside the system was an even more innovative piece of software called Telescript, a language for building and managing advanced software agents capable of doing useful work for people connected to a network.

Of course, most everyone knows what happened to General Magic. In many ways, the technology was simply too far ahead of its time. And by the time similar ideas turned up on the Internet and Web, it was too late to save the architecture. But all was not lost.

By now, you must be wondering why I choose to write about them in a magazine about Handheld PCs. As it turns out, General Magic didn't just roll over and die. It successfully regrouped and set itself the task of tackling mobile information management from a fresh perspective. And this is where Microsoft and Handheld PCs come in.

Recently, Microsoft surprised the handheld world by licensing some technology from General Magic, as well as making an equity investment in the company, both totaling no less than $6 million. What does General Magic have that Microsoft wants? Neither company is willing to get specific. In fact, the terms of the agreement preclude them from revealing precisely what Microsoft has licensed.

However, by looking at General Magic's recent efforts, we can build a reasonable picture. In a word, I believe Microsoft is interested in the technology behind "Serengeti." Serengeti is General Magic's code name for a voice controlled, intelligent virtual assistant. In a nutshell, Serengeti is a network-based personal information manager that enables you and others to manage, synchronize, and prioritize time critical business information using either a telephone (including a cellular phone), a desktop computer, or an H/PC.

What's so magic about Serengeti? Kevin Surace, vice president and general manager of the Products and Network Solutions Division explained it to me. "When we looked back about a year and a half ago, we looked at what the company had done and began to consider how we could deliver information to mobile workers without requiring them to buy a new device."

"So the question became, how could you put all this intelligence into a network and system, and deliver all of a person's public, private, and custom information to them, wherever they are, with whatever device they already own. And so the focus quickly became developing a state-of-the-art voice user interface design."

According to Surace, this would enable people to utilize cellular phones, landline phones, and everything else that they're already comfortable using. "We would thereby get away from the objections of 'it's too big, it's too heavy, it's too expensive'," said Surace. "That would be gone because this service wouldn't weigh anything."

General Magic designed the service, according to Surace, by literally following CEOs and vice presidents around to see how they get their information during the day, and what that information was. "It turns out that almost all those people got their information not via technology," explained Surace, "but via a cellular phone and a human assistant or two back at the office. So they would literally call another person, and that person would have access to all that information. And this person would convey all this information over the phone."

That information included items such as important email, voice mails, faxes, and so on. It also included news information such as their company's stock price, information about their competitors, what was going on in the market, and more. It certainly included their calendar, as well as handling all their inbound and outbound calls.

This caused a giant light bulb to go on over the General Magic building in Sunnyvale, California. What if they were able to reproduce this system for the 98 percent of mobile professional that aren't able to rely on a human administrative assistant? And that's precisely what the company has done with Serengeti.

When Surace talks about Serengeti, you often hear the words "human" and "her" intermixed with explanations about how you interact with the system. "We've focused on developing a very 'human' interface," said Surace. "You speak to 'her' no differently than you'd speak to a regular assistant, albeit perhaps more aggressively because 'she' doesn't get very mad at you."

For example, you could say 'Serengeti, could you get my important messages?' And the system may respond 'Yes, you have five messages, and three of them are important. Here's your first email...Here's your next voice mail...' To this, you may respond, 'OK, delete that, forward the email, and I would also like to reply to this email.'

"You can do all this," said Surace, "then add new appointments, reschedule others, and check upcoming meetings. In the meantime, 'she's' answering the phone for you, letting you know if someone is on the line, and finding you wherever you are. In other words, we've tried to make the system so human-like that there's nothing to learn since these are things you already know how to communicate."

Of course, you're not limited to accessing the system via General Magic's Voice User Interface (VUI). The system is also fully accessible via the Internet, using any computer with which you can browse the Web. "If you just want to go to the Web site using the handheld, and it's equipped to do so, then that's possible," explained Surace.

All the while, the system is busy synchronizing with your desktop-based contact and groupware applications, ensuring that when you do contact Serengeti, you' re presented with the most up-to-date information available.

The most innovative part of the system, and the part in which, I'm guessing, Microsoft may be particularly interested, is the VUI. "We have, combinatonially, a few hundred thousand phrases you can say to the system," said Surace. "For each sentence, we scan essentially for a beginning, middle, and end, and we look for matches. This means that you can speak very naturally saying, for example, 'Serengeti, can you find Kathleen Page's phone number?'"

Surace says that you don't have to learn a vocabulary, because they've tried to include everything that you would likely ever say. "What we've done is listen to real users, and what they say, and coded that into the system."

General Magic intends to offer this service themselves, powered by a network operations center capable of scaling to hundreds of servers and supporting more than 500,000 users. "We provide the service at all times. And as a service provider, we could offer these services to other communication companies, who in turn could resell it to end-users," said Surace.

Sounds interesting, doesn't it? I believe Microsoft thinks so as well. The implication to H/PC users is that critical business and contact information no longer needs to be cloistered on your desktop computer, waiting for you to synchronize before-you-go. Serengeti promises to offer you access to this information from anywhere you can dial a phone or access the Web. I guess General Magic may just have some pretty cool tricks left up its sleeve.