Tellme Networks, Inc. was an American company founded in 1999 by Mike McCue and Angus Davis, [2] which specialized in telephone-based applications. Its headquarters were in Mountain View, California.
Tellme Networks was acquired by Microsoft on March 14, 2007, for approximately $800 million; the deal closed in late April 2007. [3] In 2006, Tellme's phone network processed more than 2 billion unique calls. [4]
Tellme established an information number which provided time-of-day announcements, weather forecasts, brief news and sports summaries, business searches, stock market quotations, driving directions, and similar amenities. Operating by voice prompts and speech-recognition software, it was set up in 2000 as a loss-leader service to demonstrate the Tellme functionality to U.S. consumers. The voice of the Tellme service is Darby Bailey. [5]
In early 2012, Microsoft divested itself of Tellme Networks' interactive voice response (IVR) service and the majority of its employees to [24]7 Inc. [6] The service was moved to a non-toll-free number.
History
In April 1999, the Tellme founding team, consisting of Mike McCue, Angus Davis, Rod Brathwaite, Jim Fanning, Kyle Sims, Brad Porter, Michael Plitkins, Hadi Partovi, John Giannandrea, Andrew Volkmann, Anthony Accardi, Patrick McCormick, Danny Howard, Vicki Penrose, and Emil Michael assembled in Mountain View, California.
In 2000, Tellme announced a service that delivered content to telephones —a concept called voice portals. Early competitors included TelSurf Networks, BeVocal, Hey Anita, and Quack.com. Quack.com was founded in 1999 and acquired in September 2000 by America Online for its competing service, AOLbyPhone. At least ten additional competitors appeared in 2000 in various attempts to mimic the funding success of Tellme. [7]
Tellme was also featured in the 2001 documentary Wild at Start. [8] and was referenced in a 2000 Malcolm Gladwell article in The New Yorker about recruiting. [9]
In 2008 the company debuted a feature especially for Christmas Eve; callers can hear recorded messages from Santa Claus. If called on Christmas Eve, Santa will say what state he is traveling over, and exactly what he is doing. In 2009 they added a service that allows you to receive messages from Santa a week early which explain what he is doing to prepare for Christmas.
At the onset of service, as a way to gain more users, they offered a free long-distance call feature called Phone Booth. Callers would call Tellme and were given 2 free minutes of long-distance call time to their desired phone number. That service was later stopped while other services persisted.
Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows humans to interact with a computer-operated phone system through the use of voice and DTMF tones input via a keypad. In telecommunications, IVR allows customers to interact with a company's host system via a telephone keypad or by speech recognition, after which services can be inquired about through the IVR dialogue. IVR systems can respond with pre-recorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct users on how to proceed. IVR systems deployed in the network are sized to handle large call volumes and also used for outbound calling as IVR systems are more intelligent than many predictive dialer systems.
Computer telephony integration, also called computer–telephone integration or CTI, is a common name for any technology that allows interactions on a telephone and a computer to be coordinated. The term is predominantly used to describe desktop-based interaction for helping users be more efficient, though it can also refer to server-based functionality such as automatic call routing.
Caller identification is a telephone service, available in analog and digital telephone systems, including voice over IP (VoIP), that transmits a caller's telephone number to the called party's telephone equipment when the call is being set up. The caller ID service may include the transmission of a name associated with the calling telephone number, in a service called Calling Name Presentation (CNAM). The service was first defined in 1993 in International Telecommunication Union—Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Recommendation Q.731.3.
4-1-1 is a telephone number for local directory assistance in Canada and the United States. Until the early 1980s, 4-1-1 and the related 1-1-3 number were free to call in most states.
A toll-free telephone number or freephone number is a telephone number that is billed for all arriving calls. For the calling party, a call to a toll-free number from a landline is free of charge. A toll-free number is identified by a dialing prefix similar to a geographic area code. The specific service access numbers vary by country.
In telecommunications, directory assistance or directory inquiries is a phone service used to find out a specific telephone number and/or address of a residence, business, or government entity.
A Zenith number was a special type of telephony service that allowed a calling party to call the number's owner at no charge by requesting the call from a switchboard operator and citing the "Zenith", "Enterprise" or "WX" number. The service preceded the system of toll-free telephone numbers with area code 800 in the United States.
111 is the emergency telephone number in New Zealand. It was first implemented in Masterton and Carterton on 29 September 1958, and was progressively rolled out nationwide with the last exchanges converting in 1988.
SpeechWorks was a company founded in Boston in 1994 by speech recognition pioneer Mike Phillips and Bill O'Farrell. The Boston-based company developed and supported speech-related computer software. Originally known as Applied Language Technologies, SpeechWorks went public in 2000 and tripled its value. ScanSoft acquired Nuance in 2003, and changed its name to Nuance Communications.
E.123 is an international standard by the standardization union (ITU-T), entitled Notation for national and international telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and Web addresses. It provides guidelines for the presentation of telephone numbers, email addresses, and web addresses in print, on letterheads, and similar purposes.
Bing for mobile is a search tool for handheld mobile devices from Microsoft as part of their Bing search engine. It is designed for mobile device displays. Bing Mobile is built into Windows Mobile and Windows Phone as proprietary software, accessed via the Search key on Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 devices. It is also available on Windows Phone 8.1, and can be downloaded for other platforms, including and Android.
Voice portals are the voice equivalent of web portals, giving access to information through spoken commands and voice responses. Ideally a voice portal could be an access point for any type of information, services, or transactions found on the Internet. Common uses include movie time listings and stock trading. In telecommunications circles, voice portals may be referred to as interactive voice response (IVR) systems, but this term also includes DTMF services. With the emergence of conversational assistants such as Apple's Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, and Samsung's Bixby, Voice Portals can now be accessed through mobile devices and Far Field voice smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home.
Phone sex is a conversation between two or more people by means of the telephone which is sexually explicit and is intended to provoke sexual arousal in one or more participants. All parties participate voluntarily; it is typically accompanied by masturbation. As a practice between individuals temporarily separated, it is as old as dial telephones, on which no operator could eavesdrop (1930s–1950s). In the later 20th century businesses emerged offering, for a fee, sexual conversations with a phone sex worker.
GOOG-411 was a telephone service launched by Google in 2007, that provided a speech-recognition-based business directory search, and placed a call to the resulting number in the United States or Canada. The service was accessible via a toll-free telephone number. It was an alternative to 4-1-1, an often-expensive service provided by local and long-distance phone companies, and was therefore commonly known as Google 411. This service was discontinued on November 12, 2010.
Quack.com was an early voice portal company. The domain name later was used for Quack, an iPad search application from AOL.
1-800-FREE-411 is an American service offering advertising-supported directory assistance, operated by Marchex.
A telephone number is a sequence of digits assigned to a landline telephone subscriber station connected to a telephone line or to a wireless electronic telephony device, such as a radio telephone or a mobile telephone, or to other devices for data transmission via the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or other public and private networks.
Call management is the process of designing and implementing inbound telephone call parameters, which govern the routing of these calls through a network. The process is most prominently utilized by corporations and the call centre industry and has its highest effectiveness when call logging software tools are used. Calls are routed according to the set up of calling features within the given system such as Call queues, IVR menus, Hunt groups and Recorded announcements. Call features provide a customised experience for the caller and maximize the efficiency of inbound call handling. Call management parameters can specify how calls are distributed according to an operator's skill level in relation to a call, the time and/or date of a call, the location of the caller or through automatic routing processes.
Darby Bailey is an American actress, voice-over artist, musician, songwriter, writer/producer, and businesswoman. She is most known as the 'Voice of Tellme' and the voice of Verizon and AT&T's 4-1-1 Directory Assistance. Her voice has been heard billions of times by telephone callers in the U.S. since she first started voicing phone systems in 1999.
