Microsoft Looks to Boost Voice Strategy with TellMe Buy

Published: March 21, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft last week announced its intent to acquire TellMe Networks, a developer of voice and telephone services for consumers and businesses. Microsoft expects the acquisition to provide it with technology and know-how to build more voice- and speech-enabled capabilities into its products and services.

TellMe was founded in 1999, and today offers an array of voice-enabled services for businesses and consumers. Its speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies are on display at 1-800-555-TELL, a toll-free help line that lets people search for answers in a range of topics, including directory assistance, driving directions, sports scores, stock quotes, news, weather, and movie show times.

On the business front, TellMe's technology is used to streamline access to things like banking and package-tracking information. Whenever you place a call to Merrill Lynch, Federal Express, Domino's Pizza, or American Airlines, there's a good chance that your call is being automatically routed and answered through an interactive voice response (IVR) system built using TellMe's software.

According to Microsoft, TellMe's hosted voice service platform is the most popular in the world, with more than 40 million people using it every month, or 2 billion calls per year. The company has partnerships with almost every major telephone carrier, and responds to more mobile search requests than Google and Yahoo combined.

Microsoft plans to use TellMe's voice and speech capabilities in various company initiatives, including, perhaps most importantly, with its unified communication strategy, which is anchored by the SharePoint products and the upcoming release of Office Communications Server 2007. (It will be too late, however, to get TellMe's capabilities into that product, which is very close to shipping.) There are several potential ways TellMe's technologies could be used within unified communications, including enabling users to place telephone calls from applications, "voice dialing," and using speech recognition and voice commands to navigate and interact with applications.

Microsoft also plans to offer some of TellMe's capabilities to its partners and ISVs, perhaps as a plug-in to its Visual Studio development tools. The TellMe speech and voice technologies are also expected to be integrated with Windows Mobile and Microsoft's other mobile initiatives, as well as Windows and Office desktop offerings, the company said.

Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, says Microsoft and TellMe will combine to find the best uses of TellMe's technology in Microsoft's products and services. "We've made great strides in speech technologies, but have only scratched the surface of what is possible," he said. "We are going to look very broadly together with [TellMe] at how we can extend the great work that they've done more broadly in the Microsoft product line."

Mike McCue, co-founder and CEO of TellMe, says the acquisition will allow TellMe to expand its reach. "We have been working for eight years to bring together the vision and the technology necessary to allow anybody to just say what they want and get it from any telephone anywhere in the world," he said during a press conference last week. "This combination allows us to really fulfill our vision and bring it to billions of consumers, literally, on any phone."

TellMe is a privately held company based in Mountain View, California, with 320 employees. Microsoft expects the acquisition to be finalized in the second quarter of 2007. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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