Microsoft acquires TellMe - Voice/Mobile search is the target market

Microsoft announced today the acquisition of TellMe, a hosted speech applications company.  Tellme uses voice recognition to radically simplify how people use the phone to get the information they need every day. Founded in 1999, the company powers billions of calls to hundreds of phone services used by more than 40 million people every month. Some of the applications running on Tellme’s proven voice technologies include business search on 411, information search on 1-800-555-TELL as well as customer service and ordering for companies like Merrill Lynch, E*TRADE and American Airlines.

Om Malik says TellMe is already generating over $100M in revenue from the automated Call Center part of the business, and that Microsoft paid between $800M and $1B for TellMe. 

Sorry, I can't say. The numbers will be public soon enough. I can say that VCs pumped about $238M into funding TellMe, so you can infer some valuation from that.

TellMe will be an important piece of the mobile search puzzle. Users will be able to speak queries on their cell phones and get back results in text or speech. This is a huge step forward for mobile search and voice based search.

You might recall that I have been talking about Mobile Search and Local Search as two of the most lucrative search markets still up for grabs. It should be no surprise that Microsoft made this acquisition to go after these markets. Great move!

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Comments

[Greg Linden]

TellMe's voice recognition interface is very cool. Great to see Microsoft pushing in this direction.

I am convinced that the long-term success of mobile computing will require overcoming the issue of the tiny screens on these devices.

While there are a few promising paths to manage with the small screens -- including Patrick Baudisch's clever UI work at Microsoft Research, personalization (like Medio Systems') to display only the most relevant data in the limited space available, or the iPhone's use of the entire surface of the device as a screen -- I am concerned that these approaches may rapidly hit their limits.

Rather, I suspect we will have to replace the tiny screen with something else. One good option is the voice recognition interface that TellMe has developed, which represents an attempt to make the displays unnecessary. Another is the cool Virtual Retinal Display being developed at the HIT Lab at University of Washington that replaces a tiny display with a massive one covering the full field of view.

[Timmy]

Love to see what Microsoft does to TellMe's LINUX backend. And, I wonder if HadiP made any money on this...

[Bob]

Good move on MSFT's part. The only problem, though, is I see this as a move on the iPhone. If MSFT makes a phone, are they going to alienate the companies they're providing software for? These companies will def. care if MSFT enters as a hardware player. I think MSFT should build a kick-butt voice platform, not spend unnecessary time and cash on their own phone.

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

Linguistic User Interface or LUI

"Perhaps the most underappreciated accelerating transition we are participating in today is the emergence of the Linguistic User Interface or LUI. The LUI is the natural language front end to an increasingly intelligent and profoundly humanizing and malleable Internet. LUIs exist today in primitive form in interfaces like Google, but will be increasingly powerful in coming years. So what will Windows 2015 look like? For one thing, it seems clear now that it will have some very sophisticated software simulations of human beings as part of the interface."
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/tech/nextnews/archive/next040423.htm

See also:
http://www.accelerationwatch.com/lui.html
http://divedi.blogspot.com/search?q=LUI

[Mobile Local Search]

www.MobileLocalSearch.net is an informative news site for mobile search and LBS...