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December 27, 1999
Web posted at: 10:27 a.m. EST (1527 GMT)

by Ephraim Schwartz

(IDG) -- Voice access to personal information will be available next year on most major handsets, marking another major step toward marginalizing personal digital assistants in favor of feature-rich mobile phones.

Phone.com, a major supplier of wireless technology for Internet access over mobile phones, announced this week that it will acquire @Motion, a wireless provider of voice technology, for $285 million.

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The combination of the two companies will allow mobile phone users to conduct electronic-business, search Internet sites, and access and respond to e-mail using voice as the interface.

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You don't have to have a browser on the mobile phone to access personal or Internet information," Ben Linder, vice president of marketing at Phone.com in Redwood City, Calif., said Wednesday. "You just dial into a WAP [Wireless Application Protocol]-based system and talk."

Among the other features that @Motion will add to WAP-enabled devices and WAP-enabled destinations are voice dialing from an address book and voice interfaces to Wireless Markup Language, HTML, and Handheld Device Markup Language sites.

Voice expands mobile phone capability by building features into the places users call rather than into the phone, said Bill Meisel, a speech analyst and founder of TMA Associates in Tarzana, Calif.

"This will allow cell phone manufacturers to add to a mobile phone's functionality without compromising battery life," Meisel said.

Meisel also noted the irony in the fact that Phone.com, a proponent of Web-browsing on mobile phones, bought a company that reduces the need for a browser.

"It is significant that the leading proponent of using the Web phone as a micro-browser has indicated with its pocketbook that it believes that speech recognition over the telephone will be equally important," Meisel said.

The @Motion capabilities acquired by Phone.com require WAP-enabled gateways on servers and will work best with interfaces designed for a non-graphical exchange of information. For example, Amazon.com currently has a WAP-enabled interface to its site that reduces graphics and is more text-based to be useful on a small screen. Users at Amazon's site can conduct searches and buy books using voice command.

Voice-enabled cell phones will put a big strain on personal digital assistants (PDAs) and handheld devices, according to Richard Grant, a well-known speech application developer at Totally Voice, in Davie, Fla.

"It [makes PDAs] obsolete ..." Grant said. "People have to go out and purchase a PDA. They already have a cell phone."

According to Grant, it will be apparent by the first quarter of 2000 that voice-based wireless technology will become dominant in the mobile phone industry. Grant said more products would be demonstrated at the Computer Telephony Integration show in New Orleans, on Feb. 28.

The adoption of the WAP standard by almost all of the handset manufacturers including Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia, for Web-based browsing of the Internet and access to company information over TCP/IP will reduce the demand for handhelds over time, according to both Linder and Meisel.