Microsoft Buys Tellme - Aiming in the Right Direction
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Mobile search means mobile devices such as cell phones. Tellme has been doing significant work in that area. ZDNet reported that it has been testing an application for cell phones that delivers the appropriate data to the phone when users tell it out loud what information they need. Another service Tellme has been testing lets users send a text message with a search query, and receive the result via text message.
Users won't always want to type in their queries, especially in a mobile context. Imagine that you are driving your car, so you don't have your hands free to type or use text messages on your phone -- and you really shouldn't be trying to dial a phone number. You're hungry, and you want to locate the nearest pizza place. You are going to want to be able to just ask your phone -- or your car, for that matter, since this could be tied into Windows Automotive -- where it is, and get directions.
That's just the kind of scenario that McCue envisioned in the discussion of Microsoft's acquisition of Tellme during a conference call. "We think that one of the critical things with search, particularly on the phone or especially in you car is that you should be able to use voice as an interface to be able to find things easily. People who have a phone are on the go typically, they don't want to have to type things all the time to get what they want. So we really like the idea of allowing consumers to just say what they want and get it...It's almost kind of like the mouse was to graphical computing, we think speech is to mobile computing." Given how important the mouse has become to computing since its invention, this is a pretty big deal.
Another exciting idea going forward relates to the ability to use the speech interface in a cross platform way. McCue thinks that "with cars, and with the PC, with your television, why do you need to navigate through all these menus on TV when really you should just be able to say, show me The Daily Show, and now you're watching what you want to watch on TV just by speaking to it." Think about that for a second. You would give your TV a command, and it would perform a search operation to do your bidding. You would not have to set anything, check listings for the time, or even find the right channel -- and you're not even conscious of the fact that you've just performed a search operation. Now that's seamless!
Next: Challenges and Potential >>
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